CHAPTER XIVTWO PAGES IN THE BOOK OF LIFE
Thecurtain over the alcove was very cautiously lifted. Madame de Pompadour looked up from her papers. “Good afternoon, Vicomte,” she smiled. “I was expecting you; you observe I am alone.”
“Expecting me, Madame?” André demanded, astonished.
“To be sure, expecting you to report your account of this baffling affair in the woods with which all Versailles rings and to return my key.”
“I know nothing but what everybody knows of the matter, nor am I here to return your key, but to keep it.” Madame studied him with calm satisfaction. “Yes, Marquise, I am here because I have decided to enter your service.”
The lady leaned back in her chair and laughed. “But it is impossible, my dear Vicomte,” she replied lightly. “His Majesty has already appointed a master of my household.” She rose and looked into his face, stern with a determination born of a prolonged inward struggle. “You are disappointed. I thank you forthe compliment. No matter, we will arrange it another way, you and I.”
“Will Madame kindly explain?”
“You have reflected on our chat yesterday?” she asked. “Yes? You have counted the cost?” André bowed in silence. “Good. I do not ask your reasons; they are your affair, and the Vicomte does not act with his eyes shut. But I am rejoiced, my friend; I could sing with pleasure. To theentente cordialeand to our success.” She held out her hand, and in the sunshine of her gaze he raised it to his lips.
“Now listen. I have thought it all out. To the world of Versailles we are for the future deadly enemies, you and I. You have offended me. I have insulted you. What could be more natural? Already the idle tongues chatter in the galleries that the Vicomte de Nérac has refused to accept the King’s pleasure and that Madame is in tears of rage. That is my inspiration, you understand. But you will still keep my key and be in my service without any of the disgrace—eh?Mon Dieuit will be droll.”
André smiled in admiration of her finesse. A genius this marquise.
“But perhaps I shall not be in Versailles,” he said after a pause.
“Leave it to me,” she retorted gaily. “I have already provided for that. It is my little secret—avivandière’ssecret.”
She began slowly to roll up the plans on her table.
André’s eye caught one of the sheets. “Ah, you recognise it?” she asked.
“To be sure. It is the Château de Beau Séjour.”
“Yes; and what the King can give the King can take away,” she replied with her mysterious smile. “Mademoiselle Denise—patience, my friend, and hear me out—is very beautiful and very noble. It is better for women who can afford it to be content with love, their beauty, and theirnoblesse, and to leave politics alone. Politics, intrigue are a very dangerous game, particularly for young ladies. Mademoiselle would find some very instructive lessons as to that in the history of her château. It might well be that the King might desire a second time to confer Beau Séjour on a servant who had rendered precious service to his Sovereign. And,” she added, throwing up her head, “I hope Mademoiselle will learn that I will not be thwarted in my plans by a girl even though she has forty marshals of France in her pedigree.”
André listened in silence, but the colour in his bronzed cheeks revealed the strong emotion within.
“And now to business.” Madame had almost unsexed herself. The woman’s charm and grace melted into a masculine, alert, and bracing keenness. She beckoned to André to draw his chair up to the table. “‘No. 101,’ that is our affair. After last night it is more imperative than ever the mystery should be laid bare. And it is clear that the treachery starts from Versailles. You agree?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Good. The clues unfortunately are very slight. But not far from the palace is an inn called ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold’—you know it?” she questioned sharply.
“I was there eighteen months ago,” he replied, recovering himself.
“No doubt on the same foolish errand as all of us. But the crystal-gazer has vanished and cannot be traced. It is no matter. We have to do with another woman, a country wench called Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles——”
“Yvonne?” He controlled himself with difficulty.
“A curious name for a peasant wench, is it not? Well, I am convinced that this Yvonne in some way yet to be fathomed is connected with this infernal treachery. The police can discover nothing but to her credit; the police, of course, are fools. Vicomte, it is your task to master Yvonne’s secret.”
André’s fingers tapped on the table.
“You are a man, a soldier, a lover,” Madame continued in her cool voice. “You understand women. She is a peasant, you are a noble. A woman who loves will tell everything. You take me?”
“Perfectly.” He rose and began abruptly to pace up and down as he always did when his thoughts over-mastered him. Madame consulted her tablets.
“And then there is the Chevalier de St. Amant,” she resumed, and André came to a dead halt. “Heand I do not love one another. The King has his secrets from his ministers, from his valet, from me, secrets of policy, and of his private life. The Chevalier is the King’s creature, his confidant, and he is ambitious. He fears my influence, he is an adventurer, a parvenu. When he has destroyed me the hand of Mademoiselle Denise will wipe out his antecedents, will by a stroke of the King’s pen make him ruler of France and one of its greatest nobles. But,” she rose, “he shall not, he shall not.”
“No,” said André in a low voice, “by God he shall not!”
Madame smiled. “It is your task and mine,” she added, “to defeat, to crush, the Chevalier de St. Amant.”
“Yes,” said André simply.
“We are engaged on a perilous task. There is a plot, more than one, on foot to drive me from Versailles. And they are all in it, the Queen and her ladies, monseigneurs the archbishops and bishops, the Dauphin and the princesses of the blood, the ministers, the nobles, the army, even the King’s valet. In the council, the galleries, the royal study, even the King’s bedroom, day and night they are scheming and intriguing. It will be a duel to the death—one woman against the Queen, the Church, the ministers, and thenoblesse, but he who will decide is the King.”
She flung her arms up with a superbly dramatic gesture. Standing there in the triumphant consciousnessof her beauty she would have moved the most merciless of her critics to admiration. And the man who would decide was Louis XV.
“He is strange, the King,” she mused as if she had forgotten André, “how strange but few can guess—at one moment the slave of his passion, at another burning with a king’s ambition, at a third indolent and dull, at a fourth consumed by remorse, tortured by fear of God and the pains of hell. The ennui of a royal life, that is his bane. The woman who can amuse him, keep him from himself, he will never desert. And I will be that woman. My beauty will fade, but give me first five years—five years as I am to-day—and it will be death alone that will separate the King and me.”
“And you will rule France, Marquise?”
She wheeled with a flash of fire. “Yes,” she said, “I will rule France through the King.”
There was silence. Madame leaned against the carved mantelpiece; her eyes passed over the salon with its wealth and its refinement out into the measureless spaces of the future, to the rosy peaks known only to the dreams of ambition.
“Paris,” she murmured, “calls me happy, fortunate. Listen,” and she recited:
“Pompadour, vous embellissezLa cour, Parnasse et Cythère.
“Pompadour, vous embellissezLa cour, Parnasse et Cythère.
“Pompadour, vous embellissez
La cour, Parnasse et Cythère.
“M. de Voltaire is a poet. The homage of the poets, the philosophers, the artists, the wits, the homage of the world to her beauty, the love of a king—what cana woman desire more? I have them to-day, but shall I keep them?Mon Dieu!do they reflect, these mere men and women, what it costs to keep them? My life is a martyrdom. A false step, a stupid word, to be gay when I should be silent, to be dull when I should be gay—these may hurl me from my place. And the intrigues! The intrigues! Vicomte, I declare to you that at night I lie awake reckoning with tears what the day has accomplished, wrestling with what to-morrow may bring. Heartless, frivolous, and false are my foes. Is it surprising that I too should be heartless, frivolous, false? But I would not change my lot. No! Better far one year with the cup of pleasure at one’s lips; better far one glorious year in Versailles of passion and power, than an eternity of that life I knew as Madame d’Étiolles. Yes; if in twelve months I must pay the price at the Bastille I would drink now to the full the joys of an uncrowned queen of France.”
She sat down overpowered by the visions of her own spirit.
And André listened with a unique thrill of awe, torn by conflicting emotions. Of his own free will he had asked for her help because his ambitions thrust the sacrifice on him. Away from her presence he recalled with a shiver a word, a gesture, a look, that spoke of a cold selfishness, even of an insolent vulgarity, so strangely blended with such grace, charm, and sympathy. Her low birth, her position at Versailles,stirred in him the contempt that was the heritage of eight centuries of noble ancestors. But once face to face with her all his misgivings, all his scorn and dislike, melted away. And he dimly felt that her victory was no mere triumph of a beautiful and gifted woman over a man’s passion, the appeal of the flesh to the flesh, such as he knew and had yielded to so often. This was no mere idol of a royal and fleeting devotion, no mere splendid courtesan of Nature’s making; it was the breath of the human spirit to the human spirit, blowing with the divine mystery of the wind where it listed on the answering spaces of the sea. And the soaring sweep of her ambition awoke in his soul ambitions not less daring and supreme. What man in whom the ceaseless call of the siren voices within, voices that no priestly code, no laws, and no arguments can still, voices whose sweetness and strength rise from the unfathomable abysses where flesh and spirit are indistinguishable—what man who has from childhood listened to those voices within but must feel the triumphant echo when he finds a woman tempted and inspired as he has been tempted and inspired? Madame de Pompadour might be what the Court said, but there were hopes, visions, in her which the Court and King would never fathom, which it might be well she herself could only see and follow because she must. She was fate, this woman, the fate of France. Let others judge her. He could not. It was enough to listen to her summons and to obey.
And so they sat in silence lapped each in the glamour of their dreams. Sharp awaking came with the abrupt entrance of Madame’s mistress of the robes.
“The King,” she cried, “the King is coming,” and she promptly fled.
The Marquise rose almost in terror. “Quick, quick,” she whispered, “you have the key.”
But Louis had already entered, sullen and bored.
André’s genius did not desert him. “Madame,” he exclaimed with a matchless mixture of dismay and despair, “I am ruined. The King has discovered me.”
Louis broke into a laugh. His royal and jaded humour was tickled by the comic dejection in the Vicomte’s face as he shamefacedly kneeled to kiss the King’s hand.
“Ma foi!The gentleman should think of the lady,” he said smiling, “and not merely of himself.”
“True, Sire, when the lady will think presently of the gentleman. But in this case the lady will not think of him at all—alas!”
André’s half-droll, half-passionate sigh provoked a second royal laugh.
“I must find employment for this idle vicomte,” Louis remarked to Madame, “and not in your household,parbleu!”
“I fear not, more’s the pity,” André answered.
The King flung himself into a chair. His ennui had remastered him, and he stared at the screen dully. “Your Majesty is tired,” the Marquise murmured,kneeling to slip a cushion under his head. “I will read to you something amusing.”
“Not for worlds. They do not write amusing books in Paris to-day as they once did.” He stared at the carpet, then at her faultless dress, and André observed how his hand listlessly rested on hers as she remained kneeling by his side.
“It is only the book of life that is amusing, Sire,” she retorted with a gay nod. “Your Majesty writes a fresh page in mine every day.”
“Is it amusing?” he asked with a faint flash of interest.
“Shall I tell you, Sire, what my woman said this morning? ‘Do you laugh, Madame,’ quoth she, ‘when the King talks because it is a jest or because he is the King?’”
Louis looked up. “And your answer?”
“You must guess, Sire.”
“Because he is the King,” he said gloomily.
“No, no. ‘The King never jests with me,’ I replied, ‘and he is never the King to me; he is only—’” she completed the sentence by a curtsey to her heels and the suspicion of a kiss on his fingers.
“You are a foolish woman,” was the royal reply. The impenetrable eyes cleared for a moment.
André was thrilled by the ripple of laughter that floated through the room. “Ah, Sire, now you jest for the first time—absolutely the first time.”
She rose. “Monsieur le Vicomte,” she said quickly,“you have His Majesty’s permission to retire.” Then as he took his leave, “You are a man, my friend,” she whispered softly, “and you saved us both. I shall not forget,” and behind her Sovereign’s back she blew him an intoxicating adieu.
As the door closed Madame de Pompadour was whispering in Louis’s ear and a hearty royal laugh rang out.
For in such ways do kings permit themselves to be governed.