The Cat and the King (4 page)

“Very well, then. When you wish.”

He turned to his goblet, and I stepped quickly back. So far, so good. After the dinner Beauvillier told me exactly what to do next. I should stand in the front row of the courtiers waiting outside the council chamber the following morning and step immediately forward when the king came out. He would then appoint a time for an audience, perhaps immediately. It was all simple enough, but nonetheless I hardly closed my eyes that night, and Gabrielle made me drink two glasses of wine with breakfast.

At noon, outside the council chamber, I did as I had been told. The king paused to give me one of his glacial stares, a mixture of surprise and faint irritation. Then he must have recollected what Beauvillier had told him at the coucher, for, beckoning me to follow him, he stepped into the embrasure of a window, where he folded his arms and waited for me to speak.

I began with what I had intended to be the very briefest summary of the alms-bag controversy, but he interrupted me testily.

“I have no time, sir, for such nit-picking. You spend your life fussing over imagined slights. You had far better have stayed in the army, where you were of some use.”

I saw at once that the situation was desperate. I even dared now to raise my voice.

“I had no intention, sire, of bringing up the issue of ducal rights. I only wish to tell you that, as a duke, my sole aim is to be of service to you. Had the duchesse de Saint-Simon and I known in the beginning that it was your desire that she should pass the alms bag, she would have passed it joyfully, and with my total blessing, among the humblest in the land, in the most fetid of hospitals, in the darkest of dungeons!”

The king's countenance at last relaxed. “Now that's talking,” he said in a milder tone.

I went on, carried away by my excitement, to declaim on my loyalty and that of my ancestors; to tell him that we were second to none in our zeal for the royal service. The king let me continue in this way for what must have been several minutes before interrupting me at last by raising his hand. And then, to my astonishment, it was to answer me in a tone that was almost benign!

At first, I hardly took in what he was saying. His effect on me was hypnotic. I kept my gaze so firmly fixed upon his lips, not presuming to look him in the eye, that soon I began to feel a bit dizzy. His opening and closing orifice conjured up in my fantasy the mouth of a cave in the middle of a desert of infinite range and emptiness. It was as if no life could be contained in the parching dryness; that only in the darkness behind that agitated adit could there exist sustenance and support. But how could one make the passage past those teeth with any hope of safety? I was hearing the king, a voice kept saying to me! I was actually hearing the king!

And then the purport of his words began again to come through to me. His tone was almost avuncular.

“I had not thought, sir, that you had a proper excuse for quitting the army. However, if you truly wish to be of service here at court, there will always be occasion. But let me give a piece of advice. You must watch that tongue of yours! It is too inclined to be free. If you take care of that,
I
shall take care of you. I do not forget that my father loved yours.”

This reference to my beloved progenitor completely undid me. The tears, I am not ashamed to admit, started to my eyes, and I proceeded to pour forth my gratitude. I do not recall everything I said, but I know that I must have expressed with passion my desire to serve him in all matters. I ended by begging to be considered for any rooms in the château that might be available so that I should have more ample opportunity to pay my court. The reader, in another era, may smile, but he will not be able to imagine the effect of Louis XIV on his subjects when he chose to be gracious.

He spoke again. “I shall keep your request in mind.” That measured tone always convinced the petitioner that his plea had been securely filed. “One never knows when a vacancy may occur.”

And then, with that brief though definite, courteous though irrevocable nod, he moved on to the great gallery. I could feel in the very air of the chamber around me the soaring of my reputation.

Gabrielle met me in the antechamber with the round window known as the Oeil de Boeuf and took in at a glance the success of my audience. When she heard about the apartment, she clapped her hands.

“That means we're sure to get one!”

Indeed, she was right, for we were granted an apartment of three tiny rooms the very next day. They were hardly comfortable, yet they were more coveted than the greatest mansion. For only by living
in
Versailles could one fully appreciate the delights of the court. The palace at night had its peculiar pleasures and opportunities. The public was evicted, and the royal family retired behind closed doors, guarded by sleepy Swiss sentries. Something almost like informality prevailed.

It was a time for small, intimate suppers or conversations, for passionate post mortems of the day's events: who was in, who out, who had said what to Madame de Maintenon, who had been alone with the king. It was a time to call on the ministers and perhaps catch them, relaxed, in indiscretions. Oh, yes, an apartment was a great boon, and I was properly grateful to my wife.

“Now you've got everything you need!” she exclaimed proudly when we at last surveyed our redecorated reception chamber. I had even hung my father's portrait of the beloved Louis XIII over the little marble mantel.

“Need for what?”

“For whatever you want.”

“And what do I want?”

“Ah, my dear,
you
must provide the answer to that!”

T
HE
V
IDAME DE
S
AVONNE
, at this period of my life, was my closest friend. He was the merriest person imaginable, when he was not the gloomiest, for his changes of mood were dramatic. His popping blue eyes, curly blond hair and cauliflower face could be like a clown's when he roared with laughter, but when the melancholy mood descended, he seemed more like a drowned puppy. Yet up or down, he was always the most loyal of friends. He had a charming way of seeming to need me, both in prosperity and when winds blew ill.

It is commonly said that even men who have the courage of demons on the battlefield may show as cravens in the gilded salon, but I never fully believed it until I became intimate with Savonne. I saw him lead a cavalry charge at Neerwinden with a recklessness that was almost reprehensible, yet I have also watched him tremble so violently before Madame de Maintenon, who was a cousin of his mother's, that he could hardly articulate a sentence. He professed to hold as sacred as I the rights of the peers, yet he was constantly betrayed by the weakness inherent in his affable and conciliatory nature into intimacies with just the sort of parvenus who most threatened our ancient prerogatives. When I accused him of being light minded, he would shrug and retort that “favor was everything” or “money ruled the roost,” seeming to suggest that the fashionable was also the inevitable, and that resistance had gone out with the ancient martyrs.

And then, too, he laughed too much. I have always noticed that the man who tells you that he could part with anything but his sense of humor usually lacks one. Well, Savonne never said that, but he could be counted on to burst into shrieks of laughter at all the silliest things in court. He did not do so in a way to hurt peoples' feelings. On the contrary, he was very careful to wait until he was with a “safe” group before exploding. But he took too much pleasure in the ludicrous. It was more than a distraction; it became an evasion. Look around any court at your really great men, and you will find that two out of three have no sense of humor at all. It is not a necessary tool for the ambitious. Interpret everything men say in joke literally, and more than half the time you will hit their true meaning.

Savonne was always influenced by my example, at times too much so. I was disconcerted that he resigned his commission when I did. In the first place, he had much greater aptitude as an officer; in the second, being still unmarried and more than averagely susceptible to the attractions of wine and women, he was a constant prey to the temptations of court life. However, he assured me that he was determined to be steady.

“I shall model myself on the due de la Rochefoucauld,” he said. “I shall be the perfect courtier!”

Rochefoucauld was so assiduous in his attendance to the king, never missing a lever or a coucher, that he was reputed to have slept only three nights outside a royal château in twenty years.

“But what is it you wish to obtain?” I inquired.

“Anything there is to obtain!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “In Versailles, if you're not busy getting something, you're busy losing what you've got.”

I had to admit there was some truth in that. Had not Gabrielle made almost the same point? There were times when the courtiers reminded me of my pack of beagles at La Ferté waiting for the daily ration of meat to be flung to them. But Savonne's first real enthusiasm at Versailles turned out to be just the opposite of what this interchange had led me to anticipate. He showed distinct signs of becoming more devout, and I do not mean just the kind of devoutness that Madame de Maintenon had made fashionable. It was again, I suppose, his tendency to extremes.

He was, as I have said, a cousin of Madame de Maintenon, and as she was always benevolent to her relatives, no matter how distant, he had occasional access to the rooms from which the venerable morganatic spouse of our august sovereign dominated the whole of the great palace, if not indeed the whole of Europe. It was here that the king, usually accompanied by a minister, was inclined to spend his evenings: he in his armchair, she in a kind of armless sedan-chair whose red curtains protected her from drafts, on either side of a small table covered with state papers. But it was not all work. Majesty would sometimes retire with his elderly partner for the rites of love, which she, by all reports (nearing seventy as she was!), found the source of scant enjoyment.

At the point at which I write, Madame Guyon, the mystic or fake, depending on which side one took, was high in the favor of the mighty marquise, and my credulous friend was soon taken in by her, dazzled to be included in the select company which gathered to hear her in afternoon séances at Madame de Maintenon's when the king was hunting.

“You should come with me once,” Savonne told me enthusiastically. “It's an extraordinary experience. Here I am in the heart of mammon, perhaps the very earthiest spot in the whole earth, and what do I find? A holy of holies! We know that God is everywhere, but somehow one hadn't expected to run into him at court!”

This was decidedly distasteful to me. Unlike Savonne, I had no desire to talk about my religious experiences. I kept them strictly to myself. I went into regular retreats at Father La Trappe's monastery near La Ferté, and I found it necessary to my happiness to believe that God should exist and that spiritual union with him should be the ultimate goal of our being. But in some curious fashion it did not suit me to believe that God was at Versailles—except, of course, in the chapel. Versailles, as Savonne suggested, was the world, matter, the earth. It had to be just the opposite of the spirit.

“If I may say so without furiously offending you,” I observed acidly, “your distinguished cousin is a consummate hypocrite. Molière caught her to the life in
Tartuffe.
I don't know anything about this Guyon woman, but I suggest she's made out of a patch of one of the Maintenon's black gowns.”

“You think you're so original!” Savonne retorted. “And all you do is repeat what everyone says about poor Cousin Françoise. They fawn on her in public and then blast her behind her back. But if she's a hypocrite, I'd like to know what she gets out of it. Do you think she couldn't have anything in France for the asking? You know she could! And what does she spend her life doing? Running her convent school at Saint-Cyr, interviewing clerics, regulating church matters, dispensing charity. Where are her palaces, her diamonds, her golden coaches? If she's being a hypocrite about the simple life she must be an idiot, and nobody's ever called her
that!
”

I had to admit his point was well taken. Why should a woman with her power and position try to please anyone but herself? But there was still an answer, though perhaps too subtle a one for my friend: Madame de Maintenon was trying to fool God. She had conquered this world, and heaven offered her new territory. It was perfectly true that she lacked the jewels or robes of a queen, and her official position in court ranked her below the princes of the blood and the peers. She was supreme only in her own exiguous apartment. But there she
was
supreme; there she could scold the king's daughters until they emerged red-eyed, and summon to her presence the greatest in the land, who would drop everything as soon as they saw her usher. No, Savonne could not see it, but
I
could: that to glide in to the king's supper, soberly garbed, and take her place at table below some chit of a duchess while everyone greeted her entrance with silent reverence could have created a finer ecstasy in her soul than to have joined the king on his silver throne in the great gallery! Oh, yes, the old trot was a gourmet in the delights of power as well as in those of religion. Not for her the vulgarity of display or the loneliness of true prayer. Never has “simplicity” been more worldly.

Gabrielle, who had been present at our argument, now took Savonne's side with respect to his original suggestion.

“I think we
should
go to Madame de Maintenon's,” she urged me. “You like to know everything that's going on. Perhaps some great religious movement will emanate from her séances. Besides, it's considered a great privilege to be asked.”

Well, that was certainly true, and with Gabrielle's voice to spur on my own insatiable curiosity, I found myself succumbing. It was indeed a signal honor that Savonne should have been allowed to bring me to Madame de Maintenon's at all. The reputation that I had achieved for being a stickler in matters of rank had not endeared me to a woman whose principal aim in life was to promote the king's bastards, the blindly adoring governess of whom she had once been. We agreed to go with Savonne to her rooms at the next séance.