Between Two Kings Read online

  Monsieur de Condé, upon being returned to favor, had taken advantage of the royal amnesty to ask for the restoration of the many rights and privileges he’d previously enjoyed, including the service of Raoul. The Comte de La Fère, showing his usual good sense and wisdom, had immediately sent Raoul back to the Prince de Condé.

  A year had passed since the last meeting of the father and son, during which a few letters had consoled, though not cured, the pain of separation. As we’ve seen, Raoul had also left in Blois an attachment other than his filial love. But to be fair, without the intervention of chance and of Mademoiselle de Montalais, those two demons of temptation, Raoul, his mission accomplished, would have immediately galloped toward his father’s house—not without turning his head to look behind, however, though he wouldn’t have stopped even if he’d seen Louise holding out her arms.

  The first part of the ride Raoul spent missing the lover he’d just left, while the second half was spent looking forward to the father’s love he’d find when he arrived, which couldn’t come soon enough for him. Raoul found the garden gate open and rode right up the path, without paying any attention to the outraged gestures of an old man wearing a purple wool jerkin and a large hat of faded velvet. This old servant, who’d been weeding a bed of daisies and dwarf roses, was indignant at seeing a horse plow up his freshly raked path, growling out a surly “Hrm!” that made the rider turn his head. Then came a sudden change, for the man, having seen Raoul’s face, straightened up and began to run toward the house, shouting for joy.

  Raoul stopped at the stable, handed his horse to a young lackey, and dashed up the steps with an ardor that would have delighted his father’s heart. He crossed the foyer, the dining room, and the parlor without meeting anyone; at last, arriving at the Comte de La Fère’s door, he knocked impatiently and then went in almost without waiting for the word, “Enter!” spoken in a resonant voice both soft and serious.

  The count was seated at a table covered with papers and books. He was still the noble and handsome gentleman of old, but time had given his nobility and features a more solemn and distinguished character. A brow broad and smooth below long hair now more white than black; a piercing yet gentle eye beneath the lashes of a much younger man; a slender, scarcely salted mustache framing lips strong but delicate, as if they’d never been strained by mortal passions; a straight and supple figure; and an irreproachable hand—he was still that illustrious gentlemen whom so many eminent men had praised under the name of Athos.

  He was occupied in correcting the pages of a manuscript in a notebook, entirely filled with his handwriting.19 Raoul gripped his father by the shoulders and kissed him so quickly and tenderly that the count had neither the strength nor the speed to avoid it, nor to control his upwelling of paternal emotion. “You, here, Raoul?” he said. “How is it possible?”

  “Oh, Monsieur, what joy it is to see you again!”

  “You didn’t answer me, Viscount. Has a holiday brought you to Blois, or has something gone wrong in Paris?”

  “No, Monsieur, thank God!” said Raoul, his natural calm returning. “Nothing has happened but happy events; the king is getting married, as I had the honor to tell you in my last letter, and is on his way to Spain. His Majesty will stop at Blois.”

  “To visit Monsieur?”

  “Yes, Monsieur le Comte. And to make sure His Highness wasn’t taken by surprise, and to do him honor, Monsieur le Prince sent me on ahead to warn him to prepare lodgings.”

  “You saw Monsieur?” the count asked eagerly.

  “I had that honor.”

  “At his château?”

  “Yes, Monsieur,” replied Raoul, lowering his eyes, as he began to suspect the count’s interrogation had another end than curiosity.

  “Ah, really, Viscount! My congratulations.”

  Raoul bowed.

  “But did you see anyone else at Blois?”

  “Monsieur, I saw Her Royal Highness Madame.”

  “Excellent. But it’s not of Madame that I speak.”

  Raoul blushed deeply but said nothing.

  “Didn’t you hear my question, Monsieur le Vicomte?” continued Monsieur de La Fère without hardening his voice, but with a sharper look in his eye.

  “I understood you perfectly, Monsieur,” Raoul replied, “and if I pause to form my answer, it’s not because I’m looking for a lie—as you know, Monsieur.”

  “I know you never lie. But I’m surprised that it takes you this long to tell me yes or no.”

  “It’s not that I don’t understand you, but that I understand you all too well… and that you won’t be pleased by what I have to tell you. I’m sure you won’t like it, Monsieur le Comte, but I also saw…”

  “Mademoiselle de La Vallière, yes?”

  “And it’s about her that you wish to speak, as well I know, Monsieur le Comte,” Raoul said, humbly and gently.

  “And I’m asking if you’ve seen her.”

  “Monsieur, I was completely ignorant when I entered the château that Mademoiselle de La Vallière might be there; it was only upon returning toward you, after completing my mission, that chance brought us face to face. I then had the honor to pay her my respects.”

  “What name do you give the chance that brought you to meet Mademoiselle de La Vallière?”

  “Mademoiselle de Montalais, Monsieur.”

  “Who is Mademoiselle de Montalais?”

  “A young person I didn’t know and had never seen before. She’s a maid of honor to Madame.”

  “Monsieur le Vicomte, I will go no further in my interrogation, and I reproach myself for having gone so far. I asked you to avoid Mademoiselle de La Vallière and to see her only with my permission. Oh, I know that what you’ve said is true, and you didn’t seek her out! Chance caused the injury, and I won’t accuse you of it. I will just content myself with a reminder of what I’ve already said about this young lady. I have nothing to reproach her with, as God is my witness, but it does not accord with my plans for you to permit you to visit her. I beg you once more, Raoul, to hear me on this.”

  It was clear from the expression of Raoul’s eyes, usually so bright and clear, that he was troubled by this speech.

  “Now, my son,” continued the count, with his sweet smile and in his usual tone, “let’s talk about something else. Must you hurry back to your service?”

  “No, Monsieur, I have nothing else to do today other than to spend it with you. The prince, fortunately, made that my only other mission, and I could wish nothing more.”

  “The king is doing well?”

  “Perfectly so.”

  “And Monsieur le Prince also?”

  “As always, Monsieur.”

  The count forgot to inquire after Mazarin—but that was an old habit.

  “Well, Raoul! Since you have no other duty but me, you shall have my entire day. Now, embrace me. And again! How fine to have you at home, Viscount. Ah, here is good old Grimaud!20 Come, Grimaud, Monsieur le Vicomte wants to embrace you as well.”

  The old man didn’t wait to make him repeat it; he ran to Raoul with open arms, and Raoul met him halfway.

  “And now, Raoul, let’s take a turn around the gardens. Then you’ll see how I’ve improved your rooms for the holidays, and while I show you our preparations for fall, and introduce you to our two new horses, you can give me the news of our friends in Paris.”

  The count closed his notebook, took the young man by the arm, and led him to the gardens.

  Grimaud gazed sadly at Raoul, whose head now nearly grazed the top of the doorway, and, fingering his white pointed goatee, he blinked damply and muttered, “All grown up!”

  V Which Speaks of Cropoli and Cropole and of a Great Unknown Painter

  While the Comte de La Fère showed Raoul his new outbuildings and the new horses in his stable, our readers will allow us to draw them back to the town of Blois to witness an unaccustomed flurry of activity in the city. The impact of the news brought by Raoul was especially felt
in the town’s inns.

  Indeed, the king of France and his Court coming to Blois, that is to say, a hundred cavaliers, ten carriages, two hundred horses, as many valets as masters—where would everyone stay, in addition to all the local gentry who would arrive in the next two to three hours as soon as the news rippled and spread, like the widening waves from a stone thrown into the waters of a quiet lake?

  Blois, so peaceful in the morning, as we’ve seen, the quietest pond in the world, at the news of the royal visit suddenly was abuzz with tumult and turmoil. All the château’s servants, at the orders of their officers, went out into the city to fetch provisions, and ten couriers on horseback rode to the reserves of Chambord to seek game, to the fisheries of Beuvron for seafood, and to the gardens of Cheverny for flowers and fruit. Out from trunks and wardrobes came silken tapestries and chandeliers with gilded chains; an army of the poor swept the courtyards and washed the stone facings, while their wives stalked the meadows beyond the Loire to collect greenery and wildflowers.

  The city, to be as groomed as the château, scrubbed itself with brushes, brooms, and water. The gutters in the upper town, swollen by the runoff, became rivers in the lower town, and the pavement, which it must be said was often quite muddy, was washed clean and gleamed in the sunlight.

  Then musical instruments were brought out, and drawers of décor were emptied; merchants did a brisk business in wax polish, ribbons, and sword-knots, while the housewives laid in provisions of bread, meat, and spices. Soon the citizens, their houses stuffed enough to survive a siege, were donning holiday garb and heading to the city gate, hoping to be the first to see and announce the royal procession. They knew the king wouldn’t arrive before evening, or even the next morning—but what is anticipation but a kind of madness, and what is madness if not an ecstasy of hope?

  In the lower town, barely a hundred paces from the Hall of the Estates General, between the promenade and the château, in a rather pretty street that was then called Rue Vieille and was indeed very old, stood a venerable edifice, squat, broad, and with peaked gables, endowed with three windows at the street level, two on the next floor, and a small bull’s-eye window on the top. On the side of this old triangle had recently been built a new parallelogram, which in accord with the practices of the time bulged right out into the street. Though the street was narrowed by a quarter, the house was nearly doubled, and wasn’t that sufficient excuse?

  Local tradition held that in the time of Henri III this gabled house had been the residence of a Councilor of State whom Queen Catherine had come to visit—some said for advice, and some said to strangle him. Whatever the reason, no one doubted the good lady had crossed the house’s threshold with her royal foot.

  After the councilor’s death, by natural causes or by strangulation, the house had been sold, then abandoned and isolated from the other houses on the street. It wasn’t until the middle of the reign of Louis XIII that an Italian named Cropoli, escaped from the kitchens of Marshal d’Ancre,21 had taken the house. There he’d founded a small inn that served a macaroni so delicious that people came from leagues away to eat it or fetch it home.

  The fame of the inn was further spread by the fact that Queen Marie de Médicis, when a prisoner in the château, used to send for its cooking. On the very day that she escaped from the famous high window, she left behind on her table a plate of the celebrated macaroni, tasted only by the royal mouth.

  The double celebrity of this triangular house, for the strangulation and the macaroni, had given its owner Cropoli the idea of dubbing his inn with a pompous name. His own wouldn’t do, as Italian names weren’t well regarded at the time, and he didn’t wish to draw attention to his hoarded wealth, so carefully hidden. In 1643, after the death of King Louis XIII, when he felt himself approaching the end of his own life, he sent for his son, a young man for whom he had high hopes. With tears in his eyes, he advised him to guard carefully the secret recipe of the famous macaroni, to make his name more French, to marry a Frenchwoman, and, when the political horizon had cleared of its former clouds, to have a neighboring artisan carve out a fine sign, upon which a famous artist he would name would paint a portrait of the two queens above the words, “The Médicis.”

  The worthy Cropoli, after delivering this advice, had only enough strength left to point his heir toward a brick in the chimney behind which he’d hidden a thousand ten-franc coins, and then he expired. The younger Cropoli, a man of heart, bore his loss with resignation and his gain without arrogance. He began familiarizing his customers and neighbors with the practice of not pronouncing his name’s final syllable until eventually he was known as Monsieur Cropole, which as a name is tolerably French. In due time he married, giving his hand to a little French girl whom he loved, and whose parents provided a suitable dowry once he’d shown them what was behind the brick in the chimney.

  The first two points concluded, Monsieur Cropole sought for the artist who was to paint the promised sign. This painter was soon found: he was an old Italian of the school of Raphael and the Caracci,22 but it was a school he’d never graduated. He called himself a painter in the Venetian style, doubtless because he was so fond of color. His works looked good at a hundred paces but not at close range, and had never pleased the bourgeois—in fact, he’d never sold a one. But he boasted of having painted a bathroom for Madame la Maréchale d’Ancre,23 though it had burned during the disaster of the marshal’s downfall, and he was bitter at the loss.

  The elder Cropoli, as a compatriot, had been indulgent toward this Pittrino, which was the name of the artist. Perhaps he had seen the lost and lamented bathroom. He had so much esteem and even friendship for Pittrino that he’d taken him into his home. Pittrino, grateful for a roof over his head and macaroni in his belly, had helped to spread the reputation of the savory noodles and was reckoned thereby to have done great service to the house of Cropoli.

  As he grew older, Pittrino became as attached to the son as he had been to the father, and became a sort of fixture in the house, thanks he believed to his honest integrity, his acknowledged sobriety, his proverbial chastity, and a thousand other virtues that he enumerated at length, and which gave him an eternal place in the home with rights of authority over the servants. Besides, he’d established himself as the arbiter of the macaroni, maintaining the pure devotion to the ancient tradition, and wouldn’t allow one peppercorn too many or one atom of parmesan too little in the recipe.

  His joy was very great on the day when the younger Cropole told him of the promised sign. He was soon seen rummaging through an old box, from which he drew some brushes nibbled a bit by rodents but still passable, some dried-up colors in leather pouches, a bottle of linseed oil, and a palette that had once belonged to Bronzino,24 that “god among painters,” as the transalpine artist had called him in his once-youthful enthusiasm.

  Pittrino was excited and rejuvenated by his return to painting. As Raphael had done, he changed his style to suit the subject, and painted in the manner of Albani25 two partially clad goddesses rather than two queens. Thanks to Pittrino’s effusive new style, these illustrious ladies so nobly graced the sign, where they posed as Anacreontic sirens26 among a riot of lilies and roses, that the town’s principal alderman, when invited into Cropole’s parlor to view the proposed emblem, immediately declared that the two beauties were entirely too provocative to hang in the public view of passersby.

  “His Royal Highness Monsieur,” said the alderman to Pittrino, “who does us the honor to reside in our town, would not be pleased to see his mother in such a state of undress and would clap you in the royal dungeons, for he’s not always tender of heart, our glorious prince. Either remove these two sirens or change the title, or I must forbid the exhibition of this sign. This is for your own good, Maître Cropole, and yours as well, Signor Pittrino.”

  What could one say to that? Cropole thanked the alderman for his consideration and advice. But Pittrino was stricken with gloom and disappointment, for he saw which way things were goi
ng. The visitor was barely gone before Cropole, crossing his arms, said, “Well, Signor, what shall we do?”

  “We’ll have to change the title,” said Pittrino sadly. “I have some deep charcoal black that will cover the old name completely, and we can replace ‘The Médicis’ with ‘The Nymphs’ or ‘The Sirens,’ whichever you like.”

  “But no,” said Cropole. “That would go against my father’s wishes. My father desired…”

  “He desired the queens’ portraits most of all,” said Pittrino.

  “He insisted on the title,” said Cropole.

  “The proof that the portraits were of prime importance was his insistence that they resemble their models, and they do,” replied Pittrino.

  “Maybe so, but who would recognize them without the title? Nowadays the memory of the citizens of Blois is vague on their appearance. Who would know it was Catherine and Marie without the title of ‘The Médicis’?”

  “But what about my portraits?” said Pittrino desperately, for deep down he knew Cropole was right. “What’s to become of the fruit of my artistic labors?”

  “I don’t want to go to jail or see you thrown in the dungeons.”

  “Erase ‘The Médicis,’ I beg you,” said Pittrino.

  “No,” said Cropole firmly. “But I have an idea, a sublime idea… your artistry will appear, and so will my title. Doesn’t médicis mean ‘doctor’ in Italian?”

  “Yes, in the plural.”

  “Then we’ll get another signboard from our neighbor, you’ll paint six doctors on it, and below you’ll write ‘The Médicis’—which will be an amusing play on words.”

  “Six doctors? Impossible! What about the composition?” cried Pittrino.

  “That part’s up to you, but since that’s what I want, that’s what we’ll have. Enough—my macaroni’s burning.”