The Cat and the King (20 page)

When I presented myself at the apartment of the due du Maine, I found it jammed with a noisy, congratulating crowd of courtiers. Yet such was my reputation for being anti-bastard, that something like a hush fell over the room as the pretty little duke hurried towards me with outstretched arms.

“Saint-Simon, my dear fellow, I'm so delighted!”

Even I had to concede that his eyes recalled the beautiful ones of his late (O God!) half-nephew Bourgogne. No one was less sincere, no one more demonstratively affectionate, than this love child of the Montespan. I choked so that I could hardly speak.

“I have come to offer my congratulations on your elevation, sir. May you live long and prosperously to enjoy it!”

The bastard now actually embraced me. “It means all the more to me, Saint-Simon, in that the duchess and I believed you antagonistic to the edict.”

“Allow me to explain that, sir.” I was well aware of the openly smirking members of my acquaintance who moved closer to hear how I should get out of
this
one. Well, I would show them! “I have been opposed only to the intermediate rank created for you and your brother between the princes of the blood and the peers. I had thought there was neither precedent nor justification for it. But now that the king has seen fit to correct this by increasing the class of princes of the blood, I can think of no more appropriate addition than yourself.”

At this I thought it best to retire. The ingenuity of my excuse aroused considerable hilarity at court, but I had long since learned how quickly these things passed. I prided myself on having got out of a bad situation as best I could.

Gabrielle, in the meanwhile, had her hands full with the duchesse de Berry, who, since the death of the duchesse de Bourgogne, had become first lady of the land. I wonder if, since Messalina, any great princess of an imperial court has behaved so grossly. She not only drank to excess and used the foulest language; she made hardly any secret of her lovers, some of the lowest class. As even she would hardly have dared to behave so at Versailles under the eye of the king and of Madame de Maintenon, she spent most of her time at the Luxembourg, which had been given her as an official residence at Berry's death. Gabrielle ran this great establishment and ran it with the greatest efficiency; it was thanks to her that the public scandal of the duchess's life was not worse than it was. She occupied a beautiful apartment on the main floor of the palace, where I would sometimes join her for a week at a time.

“At the pace the duchess is going, she won't last long,” she told me. “But I shall have put aside enough to last us a lifetime.”

“Isn't there anything you can do to stop her?”

“Do you think me a monster? I would if I could. No, I assure you, it's hopeless. That poor girl has the drive of Louis XIV and the passion of Madame de Montespan, all without a single compensating principle, either in religion or humanity.”

Savonne and I were no longer on speaking terms. He haunted the Luxembourg, completely infatuated, drinking more and more, degraded to the point of sharing his adored princess with lackeys. Nonetheless, I was taken by surprise when Gabrielle announced to me that a
lettre de cachet
had placed him in the Bastille.

“But why?” I demanded. “Why just
him?
”

“I haven't the least idea. All I know is that it's where he belongs.”

I decided that I could not abandon a lifetime friend without a further inquiry, and at Versailles I requested an interview with Madame de Maintenon, stating my concern for my friend and her cousin. The great lady gave me a few minutes before her departure for St. Cyr. She was very old now, pale and a bit haggard, but she held herself as straight as ever, in the high red chair.

“Your wife knows all about the matter, Monsieur de Saint-Simon,” she said in a cold, clear tone. “But I have no objection to explaining it to you, if she does not care to do so. The due de Savonne has got it into his silly head that he will marry the duchesse de Berry. This, of course, is not only not to be allowed; it is not even to be thought of. The king has given orders that Savonne,
if
and when he is released from the Bastille, shall be exiled permanently to his estates. Would you suggest that the king had an alternative, sir?”

“No, ma'am,” I admitted sadly. “I am only sorry for our friend.”

“I am sorry for
all
of us, Monsieur de Saint-Simon. There is no point pretending that you and I are not aware of all the horrors that go on at the Luxembourg.”

“It is indeed a tragedy. Who could have guessed that that charming child should have turned out so?”

“Your wife could have guessed it!” Madame de Maintenon exclaimed sharply. “Or rather, she knew it all along. She was aware from the beginning of the viciousness of Mademoiselle de Valois' character. But what did your wife care for poor Berry? All she cared about was to be lady of honor. Well, I suppose she's no worse than half the court. That's what we produce, here at Versailles, while we perish in symmetry!”

“Madame, I must protest! You are not fair to my wife!”

“Oh, Monsieur de Saint-Simon, go away, please. I'm an old woman, and I'm tired. You have twice interfered with the royal family, and I hope you're proud of the results.” She put up her hands emphatically as I was about to speak. “That will be all, sir!”

Gabrielle was at our apartment at Versailles that day, so I did not, dizzy with grief and confusion as I was, have far to go to confront her. But she simply sighed when I blurted out the story of my interview, as if it were almost too much, with all that she had to go through, to be obliged to refute such naïvetés. When she spoke at last, it was in no tone of apology.

“Of course, it sounds cold-blooded, put that way. I
did
have a pretty good idea that Mademoiselle de Valois was a bad lot. But what was the alternative for poor Berry? Mademoiselle de Bourbon was not much better. Besides, Berry had been so badly educated, in that idiotic way they treat younger sons, that he would have been an easy dupe for any clever Bourbon princess. It would have been easier had there not been a war. Then he could have been matched with some docile German cow, and I promise you I would have been glad. But as it was, the poor fellow might as well marry where it would do
us
some good—you thought so yourself—”

“I did it for Orléans!” I cried in exasperation.

“Well, it comes to the same thing. We stand with the Orléans. And at least Berry had some wild nights. For that little bitch gave him a good time, I promise you. Oh, yes! He had
that,
after all, in his short, useless life. And it's about all he did have. No, Louis, I apologize to no one!”

“Gabrielle! I want you to resign your post! I can't have you working any longer for that creature!”

I had risen in my anger, and she rose now, too, but she was as calm as I was excited.

“I shall resign my post when the king asks me to, and not a minute before. So direct your plea to him, if you dare. And let me say this. I have given you every chance through the years to make a position for our children, and all you have done is dissipate our assets. You have achieved neither post nor honor. You have spent your life jumping up and down in idle protest against a great king. So I had at last to decide to do things my own way. I managed to secure the money and position the children need. I hedged my bets against the future. Whatever happens in the new reign, we shall have our chance. Leave me alone, Louis. Leave me to do things my way. I always promised that I would help you. I still think I have!”

“And what do you leave
me?
” I cried in misery.

“I leave you the last word.
Write
about us. We shall have existed only for you!”

A
ND THEN
the unthinkable thing—or rather, the only thing about which we had been thinking—happened. The king died. On September first, 1715, after the longest reign in recorded history, seventy-two years, Louis XIV bequeathed the throne that, even after the terrible reverses of the Spanish war, he had made the first of the civilized world, to a child of five. I, with hundreds of others, silent and awed, had watched him, day and night, to the very end, stiff, formidable, unable to eat and hardly to drink, refusing until the last minute to abandon his rigid routine. He had lived on stage, and he died on stage, never out of character, never missing a cue.

Why do we ever worry about the future? It may be better than we have hoped, or far worse than we have dreaded, but we can be sure that it will never be what we anticipated. That was the lesson I learned in the first years of the new reign. I had been quite accurate in surmising that Madame de Maintenon and the due du Maine would have prevailed with the dying old king to leave a will conferring the governorship of the young Louis XV and a seat on the regency council upon Maine, but what I had
not
predicted was that the due d'Orléans should have persuaded the parlement, without the slightest difficulty, to invalidate the testament and recognize his absolute regency.

Even better things were to come. The regent, who had kept his old antagonism against the bastards more alive than I should have thought likely in one so easygoing, now proceeded to direct a supine parlement to strip the due du Maine and the comte de Toulouse of their status as princes of the blood, to deny them and their issue all rights of succession to the crown and to reduce them to the peerage, ranking them only with the dates of their titles. At last I took precedence over the wretched Maine, and the day of his humiliation, when I caught his shame-faced eye with my own triumphant one across the chamber of parlement, was perhaps the most glorious of my lifetime.

Gabrielle was never a woman to indulge the mood of “I told you so.” All she said, when I returned from the ceremony, was “So there's your dragon—all paint and smoke.” And after that, very wisely and kindly, she did not refer to the matter again.

We were tranquil together once more, she and I, in those early days of the regency. Our differences had disappeared. Orléans, who was as hopeless a parent as he was capable a statesman, allowed his favorite child to do anything she wanted, so Gabrielle no longer had to make efforts to keep her respectable, and was able to confine her task as lady of honor to the remunerative business of running the Luxembourg. Versailles had been closed, and the young king moved to the château de Vincennes, so the capital of France was again Paris, or rather the Palais-royal, to which I repaired almost daily as a member, appointed by Orléans, of the great regency council. I had re-occupied my comfortable hôtel in Paris, for my mother, now very old, preferred to live in La Ferté. It was, on the whole, a good life.

So why should I have not been indefinitely contented? We had weathered the crisis of the great king's passing. The bastards had been put in their place. Orléans had been restored to his rightful position. The young king had improved in health and was beautiful to look upon. Why was not all for the best in our fair land of France?

The answer, I think, lay in the complicated character of Orléans himself. He was wise, shrewd, quick-witted and generous. He was totally devoid of vindictiveness. He allowed Maine, once reduced to his proper status, to keep all his wealth and other honors. Even those who had wickedly conspired against the regent were let off with simple admonitions. Hardly a day went by at the Palais-royal when I did not see him sign a pardon or mitigate some ghastly punishment. In foreign affairs he adopted the healthy policy of healing the open wound between England and ourselves, and he made every effort to conciliate the suspicious and still resentful king of Spain.

Yet he was like the child in the fairy story who had received every gift but the knack of coordinating them. What seemed to me his deepest deficiency was in any real faith in himself, or in the House of France, or in God. It was as if he were playing a part, and laughing at us for trying to believe in him. I suspected that the only times he considered that he was actually living were when he retired in the evening with a group of debauched friends, including, alas, his Messalina of an oldest daughter, behind doors that were not to be opened except in the direst emergency, and dined and wined and God knows what else, waited on by handsome servants of both sexes, until the small hours. How could these orgies not have affected the morale of our government from top to bottom?

Of course, they did. The word “regency” to this day has a ring of free living, loose manners, godlessness. And then, too, the regent's stubborn passion for experimentation was productive of disaster. It was he who encouraged that wily Scot, John Law (whose surname should have been just the opposite), to launch his Mississippi Company, which embarked the whole nation on a torrent of inflationary spending. Nothing could have been more destructive of the ordered hierarchy of our society. I had always supposed that if our system were ever to be toppled, it would be by a revolution, as in England, when the Puritans had cut off the head of Charles I, great-great-grandfather of our own infant king. But now I saw that violence and bloodshed would not necessarily be required. With inflation a lackey could become a millionaire, and a duke a bankrupt. The figures did it all.

But when I protested to Orléans about what the world was becoming, he would simply laugh at me.

“Really, my friend, do you think I can change the shape of history? You are very flattering. Even my uncle could not do that.”

When arrangements were made to marry his daughter Mademoiselle de Montpensier to the prince of the Asturias, heir to Philippe V, I asked Orléans if he would appoint me to the post of special ambassador to escort the young princess to Madrid.

“I can't imagine a better man for the job!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “You're the only person who can beat the Spaniards in etiquette!”

Gabrielle had no idea of making the arduous trip to Spain, and she objected to the immense personal expenses to which I would be subjected. When I pointed out, however, that my real objective was to obtain the rank of Spanish grandee, which under the circumstances Philippe V could hardly refuse me, and confer it on our second son, she withdrew her objections.