The Cat and the King (11 page)

“What a happy day for Conti! He must be quite overjoyed.”

“Isn't it splendid, dear Madame, that we should have the House of Bourbon represented on
two
thrones?”

“Do you think the new king will have many regrets at leaving poor old Versailles?”

“Surely not! With such a glorious future he will forget us all in a week's time!”

“What will he call himself? François premier? Of course! As gallant as his namesake.”

Madame la Duchesse suddenly threw back her head and laughed with a gaiety it was hard to believe was feigned.

“I don't suppose there are many of us here who would be difficult to forget!” she exclaimed. “No, if I were going to Warsaw, I should have no need of amnesia. The only thing I do not envy my fortunate cousin is the loss of his sovereign. How can it be a happy event to leave the court of the king you all profess to adore?”

When the princesse de Conti, tiny, dark and dour, approached the circle, Madame la Duchesse rose and curtsied low to the new queen. The latter's eyes glittered.

“You must pity us, dear cousin,” she said with a simpering smile. “We leave you in God's country while we travel north to the land of ice and snow! How shall we manage without your wit and warmth?”

“Ah, my dear, you will be in Poland what you have been here: the winter queen!”

It was typical of her wit. Everyone knew that her term referred to the sexual temperature of Conti's wife.

But I was now in for a surprise. As Madame la Duchesse left the group and passed me, she rapped me lightly on the knuckles with her fan and indicated with a brief but imperious nod that I was to follow her. In the gallery, she seated herself on a divan and pointed to the chair beside it.

“I have a bone to pick with you, Monsieur de Saint-Simon. You were sitting there as if you were at a comedy. As if I were putting it all on!”

“If it was a performance, it was a splendid one! If not, it was a touching tribute to a great prince. Either way, I applaud.”

“Why should I not be glad to see the prince de Conti king of Poland? Do you think it is pleasant for me to see a man of his ability wasting his time at court? Do you think I care nothing for his advancement? For his glory?”

“I think you will miss him. As will we all.”

“Of course, I shall miss him! I shall miss him horribly. You know all about that. You're his friend. But you think I care only for my own satisfaction. It never occurs to you that I could put his best interests ahead of myself!”

I looked at those dark flashing eyes and marveled at her candor. “You honor me with your confidence, Madame.”

“And you wonder why? I'll tell you. It's because you hold Conti in your heart.”

I hesitated. “He does me the honor to call me his friend.”

“Friend? I know nothing about friendship. I know about love. You and I
love
Conti.”

I stared at the duchess in alarm and fascination. What on earth did she mean? And how did she know about my emotions? I had told Conti, of course, about my devotion to my father and to the due de Beauvillier. Perhaps he had told her about my cult of loyalty. But how could she equate this with her passion for Conti? And yet—somehow—as I looked into those mocking, smiling eyes, I seemed to sense a depth behind them.

“How do you mean...” I stammered, “when you say that I... love the prince?”

“Oh, I don't mean like his pages, if that's what worries you,” she replied with a snort. “I don't accuse you of that.”

“Surely, ma'am, you don't believe such gossip!” I exclaimed, scandalized at the casual way in which she threw this off.

“Never mind what I believe. What have such matters to do with me? I've spent my life at court, and if I've learned anything, it's not to let the few good things that happen to me be spoiled by the bad. Conti and I, that's a box, a precious one, and I keep it tightly closed, except when I open the lid just a crack, like this, when I'm talking to you; and that's only because he said I could trust you! But you don't think I pop my husband into that box, or his wife, or my children, or his? Or anyone or anything else? Never! I'm not such an ass.”

“Why do you tell me all this?” I asked, bewildered.

“Because when he goes to Poland, you and he will write each other, and I will give you messages. Oh, don't look at me that way! I shan't shock you. You won't have to put in anything you don't choose. And he will do the same, in his letters to you. There! Does that disgrace you? Does that make you a bawd? Think of it, my dear duke; I may never see him again!”

Her eyes sparkled, but not with tears, and I took her hand and raised it gravely to my lips.

“If he becomes a great king,” I murmured fervently, “I know where he will have learned his trade.”

“It's a scene from Corneille, isn't it?” she replied, but then she spoiled it all with that terrible mocking laugh. I felt like a fool.

“I may not, after all, be available for your correspondence,” I observed dryly.

“Ah, traitor, why?”

“Because I may wish to share his glory!”

“You mean you want to go with him?” Madame la Duchesse, raising her eyebrows starkly, actually looked like her father. “Not till we tell you, anyway. We need you
here.
”

T
HE PRINCE DE
C
ONTI
departed for Poland, with Savonne on his staff, for Madame de Maintenon finally let him go. For some weeks we had no news, but after they were established in Warsaw I heard regularly from both. The news was not good. The elector of Saxony had entered the contest for the throne and had gathered considerable support from the nobles in the north. There seemed a distinct possibility of civil war. My information was slower than the official couriers because my correspondents had to wait until a messenger whom they trusted was going to France. We could not take the risk of being opened by the king's police spies.

Conti's letters to me, which I turned over to Madame la Duchesse, were eloquent. He seemed thoroughly absorbed in the business of winning adherents, and supplied me with all kinds of interesting details about politics in that murky, northern world, but each letter invariably ended with a nostalgic evocation of what he had left behind at Versailles.

“Perhaps it is just as well that things ended when they did. I wonder how much longer the envious court would have allowed us to go on as we were going. People resent what is unique. They could see that between her and myself there was something that never could have been engendered between either of us and any other person, something that seemed to have no real relation to either of us taken alone.”

It was perfectly true. There was a glow between Conti and Madame la Duchesse that had seemed at times to awe even their angry and jealous spouses, that had almost silenced the objections even of Madame de Maintenon and the king. Simply to see them together in the garden at Marly, or sitting beside each other at the comedy, smiling and chatting like the most proper in-laws, was to receive the impression of a bond that was all the stronger for having been adapted to the public gaze. Although they were both intensely physical and passionate beings, they seemed to communicate on a level above or beyond the senses. Perhaps that was simply because they made the rest of us feel a bit quaint, a bit ridiculous, even, at times, irrelevant. The most striking thing about their passion was that it appeared to dignify them. Madame la Duchesse seemed less trival, less malicious, certainly less heartless, when she was with Conti, whereas he with her seemed stronger, more resolute, less inclined to see the world as a decaying and purposeless planet.

“What keeps me going is the sense that I have been granted the greatest boon a man can have in her love, and now the Almighty, or providence, or simply the community of man, is requiring that I give something back to the world in return. If I ever establish my crown, there will be no end of things that I can accomplish here. Think of it, Saint-Simon! A prince of the blood who may actually be of service to his fellow men!”

Madame la Duchesse became very intimate with Gabrielle and myself in these days. She professed to follow the Polish proceedings with the deepest interest and never showed by so much as a blink of the eye that she was afflicted by the prospect of her lover's permanent displacement. On the contrary, she seemed full of hopes for his glory and would say that we should all be known in the pages of history as mere footnotes to his great career!

“Of course,
you
may be something more, Monsieur de Saint-Simon,” she told me one afternoon when Gabrielle and I had met her, as appointed, by Neptune's Basin. “You may be his first minister.”

“What makes you say that, ma'am?” Gabrielle asked. “How could the king of Poland have a subject of our king as his first minister?”

“Well, as long as your husband was willing to live in Warsaw, his nationality would make no difference.”

“And
is
my husband willing to live in Warsaw?” Gabrielle faced me with a look of calm inquiry.

“It's an idea I've played with,” I admitted, in some embarrassment. I had not wished to upset Gabrielle before any final decisions were taken.

“Would it not be good of you to inform me, before transporting your wife and infants to a land of snow and ice?”

Madame la Duchesse glanced, I thought rather maliciously, from me to my wife. It always pleased her to uncover family dissension.

“You would be given plenty of time, my dear,” I assured Gabrielle as blandly as I could, “before anything so drastic was asked of you. Who knows? If I did go, it might be only for a few months at a time, on an advisory basis.”

“And I should be left alone here, at Versailles?”

It was the first time that Gabrielle had ever crossed me—at least in the presence of a great person. I was surprised.

“You would always be at liberty to come with me.”

“There!” cried Madame la Duchesse. “Can you want more than that, my dear?
I
couldn't. Why, I should love to go to Poland this very minute!”

“With small children, ma'am?”

“The smaller the better! They wouldn't get in my way when I was there.”

The only way that one could perceive the strain on Madame la Duchesse was in her increased acerbity with members of the royal family. Her younger sister, the new duchesse de Chartres, who now, as a granddaughter-in-law of France, outranked the wife of a prince of the blood, particularly irked her. In marriage contracts witnessed by the king and his children, where Madame la Duchesse now had to sign under her sister, she would style herself “Louise-Françoise de Bourbon—
legitimated
” in large handwriting to call attention to the fact that Madame de Chartres always omitted the humiliating qualification. And at a performance of
Esther
she actually hissed the reference to the disgrace of the “haughty Vashti,” notoriously inserted by Racine as a compliment to Madame de Maintenon at the expense of Madame la Duchesse's mother. Yet when she was seen the next day emerging from her “stepmother's” apartment after what was assumed to have been one of the Maintenons famous dressings down, her eyes were not red, as in the case of other scolded princesses, but clear and defiant.

Matters were not going well in Poland. It began to look as if the whole project might fail. Conti now found that he had problems with French as well as Polish support. One evening at home I read Gabrielle this part of one of his letters:

“The king expects me to back French policy in everything, particularly in Spain. On the death of King Charles, which can't be far off now, he and the emperor will both claim the throne by descent. Charles is supposed to be supporting the French claim in his will, and it is generally believed that our king would pass the Spanish crown on to one of his grandsons. I feel very strongly that it would be disastrous to have Versailles and Madrid that closely linked. It might unite all Europe against France in a terrible war.”

Gabrielle made no comment. She simply reached out her hand for the letter. I did not give it to her.

“I think this one is
not
for the eyes of Madame la Duchesse.”

“I thought they all were. I thought that was the understanding.”

“Ah, but you forget my discretion. Madame la Duchesse is a very loose talker. If the king got wind of the views of his Polish candidate towards his great goal—Spain—all would be over.”

“You mean the prince de Conti would be recalled?”

“And his kingdom would disappear like a dream! We can hardly put a weapon like that in the hands of a woman who wants him home.”

Gabrielle looked at me curiously. “I thought you thought she was so noble. So disinterested. Like a heroine of Corneille's. You did rather go on about it, dear!”

“Well, why tempt people? If Madame la Duchesse asks you, say that we have not heard from Conti this week.”

Gabrielle nodded obediently. “Just so. The posts are terrible!”

As it turned out, that was the last letter I had from Conti. Some weeks later a majority of the Polish nobles went over to the elector of Saxony, and the game was up. There was nothing for my poor hero to do but creep ignominiously back to Versailles.

T
HE APARTMENTS
of the due and duchesse de Bourbon in the great south wing were very splendid. Monsieur le Due had hung the walls, as if he had been at his own château at Chantilly, with the same vast, bloody battle scenes that his grandfather, the Great Condé, had used to show Conti as a boy. Of course, in so trying to deflect attention from his own minimal war career, he drew attention rather violently to it. Interspersed with these pictures of carnage were big, pompous Rigaud portraits of Condé warriors in brilliant armor, with further slaughter going on in the background.

Monsieur le Due was a tiny man, like all the Condés. His father, the great hero's son, had cared more for genealogical than physical splendor and, by marrying a Palatine princess, had blighted his posterity with the dwarfishness of the Gonzagas. The slight stature of Monsieur le Due was not improved, either, by a pot belly, but, although one of the most malicious men in court, he could be very bright and witty, and I always enjoyed an occasional chat with him on a neutral subject.