The Cat and the King (14 page)

“A bitch. Exactly.” Orléans was not one to leave an
i
undotted. “It can be great fun to have an affair with a bitch. You ought to try it some day, Saint-Simon. It might take your mind off the all-absorbing question of whether you shouldn't be the thirteenth instead of the fourteenth ranking duke of the realm.”

“What does Madame Lucifer say to all this?” I demanded, ignoring his last observation.

“Well, it's very odd, but I think she prefers to have me confine my infidelities to the royal family. You know what they say about my wife, don't you? That she's a princess, even on...” He waited, smiling, for me to finish.

“Even on her closed stool? You
do
hear everything.”

“Well, I pick up the smut while you pick up the gossip. But, seriously, to come back to our friend Conti, I thought it might do him good to see his lovely duchess as she is. For don't think I've been her only diversion. Far from it! I even figured that the king might send me back to the Spanish front to get rid of me. And maybe I could persuade Conti to go along. It might be the saving of him.”

I stared, astonished to find such evidence of good will under the appearance of betrayal. But that was Orléans' way.

“I'm afraid it's a bit late for that now. Conti's not well enough for a campaign.”

“Nonsense. A little less wine, a little more exercise, and we'll bring him around.”

But there was no basis, alas, for such optimism. My poor old friend and hero was dying. Of what he was dying I did not know, but his skin was, if possible, even paler, and his eyes, dry now, had a funny fixed little glitter. He spent less time at court and more in his house in Paris. The last time I visited him there he was stretched out on a divan, clad in a long blue robe. He simply gazed out the window while I told him the news from Versailles, but when I had finished, he said something that I shall always remember.

“You must write down these things, Saint-Simon. You have a style of your own. Or perhaps I should say, a style of your era. It's odd, but very few people in any era have its style. Most people might belong to almost any era as well as their own. And there are some who belong to only one, and it's often their misfortune not to live in it. I, for example, should have lived in the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Madame la Duchesse should have been a great courtesan in Byzantium. And Orléans... I don't know. I suspect that his era may not yet have come. But if a man has a contemporary style, he should certainly express it. In words or pictures or music or buildings. That is how we hang history, on pegs. Otherwise it would be a hopeless jumble. You
are
Louis XIV. You and the king. Perhaps there are only two of you, after all.”

He smiled his charming smile when I rose to take my leave, and stretched out his poor thin hand.

“Goodbye, Saint-Simon. Man of our time.”

There were tears in my eyes. “I'll come back, sir. Soon.”

“You will find me gone. But do not be sad for me. I shall be quite happy in the court of the Antonines!”

Three days later he was dead. The king ordered a week of court mourning. Madame la Duchesse betrayed by not so much as a quiver or a blink the extent of her desolation. It must have helped her to know that a thousand eyes were trying to ferret out her secret.

 

 

 

B
Y
1709 the War of the Spanish Succession had been fought on three fronts for eight years, and we had lost much of the territory that we had gained in the earlier, more successful conflicts of the reign. Worse still was the prospect of the invasion of our land by British, Dutch and German troops under Marlborough and Prince Eugène. In Spain, Philippe V still clung to the throne on which his grandfather had precariously placed him, but half his country was in enemy hands. Louis XIV had now been king for sixty-six years, and it was beginning to look as if the hitherto most glorious reign of our history might end as the least. Gloom pervaded the halls and corridors of Versailles. Madame de Maintenon shivered by her fire in the coldest winter of record while her septuagenarian lord and master shook his head gravely over the latest dispatches. Throughout the icy palace makeshift chairs and tables had replaced the glorious silver furniture melted down to refill a depleted treasury.

It was at this, our lowest point, that the arrogance of our enemies turned the tide. Just as half the court were beginning to murmur about a negotiated peace, just as Madame de Maintenon herself, a shameless defeatist, was talking openly to her intimates about the advisability of Philippe V's abdicating, news came of the proposed allied conditions. Not only should our king have to expel from his court the exiled Stuart pretender; he should have to assist actively in the dethroning of his own grandson! Versailles, Paris, all of France were suddenly united in a single resolution. From the highest rank to the lowest the nation rallied behind the embattled old monarch and flung down the gauntlet before the allied powers. Out of defeat we were to snatch, if not victory, then a kind of stalemate.

But behind our new unity there was, at least at court, a deep and dangerous division. Although the king was still in good health, it was beginning to be obvious, even to those most in awe of him, that he could not live forever, and it is in the nature of courtiers to look to the new reign. The powers at Versailles were split into two factions: those who hoped to dominate the dauphin when he should become Louis XV, and those who, knowing they had no chance of this, hoped at least to contain his power to harm them until
his
son should succeed, as Louis XVI. The dauphin, after all, was almost fifty, stupid, timid, overweight and overindulgent. One knew the liability of such types to sudden strokes and seizures. His oldest son, the due de Bourgogne, on the other hand, was strong, bright and virtuous. The little sympathy that existed between father and son required the ambitious courtier to make a choice between them—the issue could not be straddled. Did one want to be great in the brief and possibly inglorious reign of Louis XV or wait for the longer and presumably more splendid one of his successor?

The dauphin's cabal was centered at Meudon, the château near Versailles where he spent most of his days, avoiding as much as he could the magnificent sire who had always terrified him. He lived there with a plain little creature, a Mademoiselle Choin, whom he was supposed to have married after the death of the dauphine, but who was reputed to have little influence over him. The person who exercised this was none other than my old friend, his half-sister, Madame la Duchesse (de Bourbon), now widowed and seemingly intent on substituting the new pleasures of power for the old pleasures of the bed. She dazzled and fascinated the heir apparent, who did everything she wanted so long as she never asked him to give up a day's hunting, which, needless to say, she never did. Aiding her was the usual bevy of royal bastards: the dowager princesse de Conti (my late hero's sister-in-law), the due du Maine and the comte de Toulouse.

Bourgogne, of course, was the center of the other faction, but, like his father, he did not dominate it. He was a noble prince, with a fine mind and high ideals, who had matured splendidly after a rather violent boyhood, but he was religious to the point of being priestly, and he was dreadfully inhibited with anyone of the least sophistication. His wife, who was all charm and loveliness, made up for his shyness as best she could, and held both the king and Madame de Maintenon in the palm of her hand, but she, too, lacked the force and self-confidence to dominate a faction of the court. For this there was only one person: the due d'Orléans. Bourgogne trusted him, although deploring his irreligion, and liked to discuss with him the problems that would confront a new ruler. Orléans was not only a man of integrity; he had great intelligence, as I have previously emphasized, and he used the idleness that the king enforced upon him to study law, politics, military strategy and science. He even maintained a laboratory in the Palais-royal, where the smells and smokes of his experiments gave birth to widespread rumors that he was engaged in witchcraft!

The adherence of the due and the duchesse d'Orléans to the Bourgognes had the effect, unfortunately, of deepening the rift between the latter and Meudon. But this could not be helped. When Orléans had at last—because of the grimness of the war situation—been given a command in Spain, he had incurred the undying wrath of Monseigneur (as the dauphin was known) by listening to a delegation of Spanish nobles who had come to suggest him as a possible successor to Philippe V. He had also, finally and fatally, dished himself with Madame de Maintenon by offering a toast to her at a drunken officers' dinner as “General Cunt, our true commander-in-chief.” Of course, this was relayed to Versailles in a matter of days by galloping messengers. It was all most unfortunate, but I have made it clear in my memoirs that those who admired and liked Orléans (of whom I was always one) had to learn to put up with his occasional extravagances.

Between the two groups, or rather over them, was the perennial figure of the king and, at his side, that of Madame de Maintenon. Both adored the duchesse de Bourgogne, who was always with them, a kind of pet kitten, cajoling, joking, loving. Both were bored by the dauphin. On the other hand, the king regarded the too-pious Bourgogne as a bit of a prude or puritan, and he was always amused by Madame la Duchesse. And then, of course, Madame de Maintenon abominated Orléans and loved Maine. So wherever one looked one came up with a check or a balance. The factions were not unevenly weighted.

It was my conviction that a future sovereign who was in the hands of the bastards (except, of course, for the duchesse d'Orléans, who felt almost as I did about her co-illegitimates) would be the worst possible thing for the kingdom, and it was this that made me at last resolve to take up once more an active role in court intrigue. I felt that it was my duty to strengthen the party of the due de Bourgogne: first, that it might find itself in a position to offer effective resistance to those who would be trying to dominate the new king, and second, that it might be ready to handle power when and if power should be available.

It should not come as a surprise to my reader at this point that it was Gabrielle who showed me where to start. This occurred in the salon of our little apartment, one morning, when she was ostensibly reading a volume of Madame de La Fayette and I was reviewing my weekly notes.

“The king wants to marry Berry,” she said in a tone that was clearly intended to open a discussion.

“And high time. He's twenty-five.” Charles, due de Berry, the dauphin's third son, had moved closer to the succession when the second, the due d'Anjou, had renounced his French rights on becoming king of Spain. “Who are the candidates?”

“Well, of course, the war makes it difficult to find a princess abroad.” Gabrielle paused. I knew that she was perfectly sure of my attention. Neither of us would have to mention so obvious a fact as that the prospect of a home bride immediately presented the danger of a bastard. “I think that the due d'Orléans should put up the name of Mademoiselle de Valois.” This was the eldest Orléans daughter. She was only fifteen but reputedly mature for her age, and very handsome. I had not seen her for a year. “It would be just the thing to bolster Orléans with the king, with Bourgogne, with everyone of our persuason,” Gabrielle continued. “And, what's more, Berry likes her.”

I brushed this aside. “What about her bar sinister?”

“You mean her mother's? Don't you think that if you're pure Bourbon on your father's side, it makes up for being only a legitimated one on your mother's? After all, both the girl's grandfathers were sons of Louis XIII.”

“I still point out that if a son of that girl should ever sit on the throne, we should have a sovereign who was a great-grandson of Madame de Montespan by one of her lovers.”

“But if that lover was the king?”

“What difference, genealogically, does it make
who
that lover was? Surely, Gabrielle, we've been over this a thousand times!”

“At least. Very well, you can choose. If the prize doesn't go to Mademoiselle de Valois, it will go to Mademoiselle de Bourbon.”

“Are you sure of that?” I cried.

“Perfectly sure.” Gabrielle's slightly puckered eyebrows showed that she appreciated my agitation. She liked to demonstrate her surer ear for court gossip. “Madame la Duchesse is pushing it for all she's worth. She's bound to pull it off if we don't act.
Now.
”

Well, here was a quandary. Madame la Duchesse's daughter was in precisely the same genealogical position as Mademoiselle de Valois. The girl's father, the late due de Bourbon, was certainly a pure Bourbon, and her mother was only a legitimated one. Both girls were granddaughters of the king on the left-hand side.

“I suppose if it has to be one or the other,” I mused, “one might as well pick the higher ranking: the daughter of a grandson of France as opposed to the daughter of a prince of the blood.”

“Particularly when it's the Orléans against Madame la Duchesse!”

We agreed at length that Gabrielle should speak that very day to the duchesse d'Orléans, and I to her husband. Gabrielle, I had to admit again, did better than I. Madame Lucifer threw her pride to the winds and confessed eagerly to my wife how ardently she desired the match. She even promised Gabrielle the position of lady of honor to the new duchesse de Berry if the match came off. I at once demurred to this.

“Your rank entitles you to be lady of honor to the duchesse de Bourgogne!”

“But that position is filled.”

“We can afford to wait.”

Gabrielle hesitated. When she hesitated, I knew I was being “managed.” “We can talk about it later,” she said. “If we pull this off.”

I had no trouble about the due d'Orléans agreeing to the proposal. He adored his oldest child, almost at the expense of his other children ; they had had, the two of them, father and daughter, from her earliest years, an extraordinary compatibility of wit and temperament, and it was natural that he should want for her the greatest match in the land, which Berry (Bourgogne's son being but an infant) still was. But he showed an unexpected reluctance to go to the king himself.