Catherine De Medici, Honoré de Balzac [best short novels of all time TXT] 📗

then how she stands by us. Up to this time, however, I am certain she has held no communication whatever with the heretics."

"Well, it is time now to reveal the whole plot to the king, and to the queen-mother, who, you say, knows nothing of it,--that is the sole proof of her innocence; perhaps the conspirators have waited till the last moment, expecting to dazzle her with the probabilities of success. La Renaudie must soon discover by my arrangements that we are warned. Last night Nemours was to follow detachments of the Reformers who are pouring in along the cross-roads, and the conspirators will be forced to attack us at Amboise, which place I intend to let them enter. Here," added the duke, pointing to three sides of the rock on which the chateau de Blois is built; "we should have an assault without any result; the Huguenots could come and go at will. Blois is an open hall with four entrances; whereas Amboise is a sack with a single mouth."

"I shall not leave Catherine's side," said the cardinal.

"We have made a blunder," remarked the duke, who was playing with his dagger, tossing it into the air and catching it by the hilt. "We ought to have treated her as we did the Reformers,--given her complete freedom of action and caught her in the act."

The cardinal looked at his brother for an instant and shook his head.

"What does Pardaillan want?" said the duke, observing the approach of the young nobleman who was later to become celebrated by his encounter with La Renaudie, in which they both lost their lives.

"Monseigneur, a man sent by the queen's furrier is at the gate, and says he has an ermine suit to convey to her. Am I to let him enter?"

"Ah! yes,--the ermine coat she spoke of yesterday," returned the cardinal; "let the shop-fellow pass; she will want the garment for the voyage down the Loire."

"How did he get here without being stopped until he reached the gate?" asked the duke.

"I do not know," replied Pardaillan.

"I'll ask to see him when he is with the queen," thought the Balafre. "Let him wait in the _salle des gardes_," he said aloud. "Is he young, Pardaillan?"

"Yes, monseigneur; he says he is a son of Lecamus the furrier."

"Lecamus is a good Catholic," remarked the cardinal, who, like his brother the duke, was endowed with Caesar's memory. "The rector of Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs relies upon him; he is the provost of that quarter."

"Nevertheless," said the duke, "make the son talk with the captain of the Scotch guard," laying an emphasis on the verb which was readily understood. "Ambroise is in the chateau; he can tell us whether the fellow is really the son of Lecamus, for the old man did him good service in times past. Send for Ambroise Pare."

It was at this moment that Queen Catherine went, unattended, toward the two brothers, who hastened to meet her with their accustomed show of respect, in which the Italian princess detected constant irony.

"Messieurs," she said, "will you deign to inform me of what is about to take place? Is the widow of your former master of less importance in your esteem than the Sieurs Vieilleville, Birago, and Chiverni?"

"Madame," replied the cardinal, in a tone of gallantry, "our duty as men, taking precedence of that of statecraft, forbids us to alarm the fair sex by false reports. But this morning there is indeed good reason to confer with you on the affairs of the country. You must excuse my brother for having already given orders to the gentlemen you mention,--orders which were purely military, and therefore did not concern you; the matters of real importance are still to be decided. If you are willing, we will now go the _lever_ of the king and queen; it is nearly time."

"But what is all this, Monsieur le duc?" cried Catherine, pretending alarm. "Is anything the matter?"

"The Reformation, madame, is no longer a mere heresy; it is a party, which has taken arms and is coming here to snatch the king away from you."

Catherine, the cardinal, the duke, and the three gentlemen made their way to the staircase through the gallery, which was crowded with courtiers who, being off duty, no longer had the right of entrance to the royal apartments, and stood in two hedges on either side. Gondi, who watched them while the queen-mother talked with the Lorraine princes, whispered in her ear, in good Tuscan, two words which afterwards became proverbs,--words which are the keynote to one aspect of her regal character: "Odiate e aspettate"--"Hate and wait."

Pardaillan, who had gone to order the officer of the guard at the gate of the chateau to let the clerk of the queen's furrier enter, found Christophe open-mouthed before the portal, staring at the facade built by the good king Louis XII., on which there was at that time a much greater number of grotesque carvings than we see there to-day,--grotesque, that is to say, if we may judge by those that remain to us. For instance, persons curious in such matters may remark the figurine of a woman carved on the capital of one of the portal columns, with her robe caught up to show to a stout monk crouching in the capital of the corresponding column "that which Brunelle showed to Marphise"; while above this portal stood, at the time of which we write, the statue of Louis XII. Several of the window-casings of this facade, carved in the same style, and now, unfortunately, destroyed, amused, or seemed to amuse Christophe, on whom the arquebusiers of the guard were raining jests.

"He would like to live there," said the sub-corporal, playing with the cartridges of his weapon, which were prepared for use in the shape of little sugar-loaves, and slung to the baldricks of the men.

"Hey, Parisian!" said another; "you never saw the like of that, did you?"

"He recognizes the good King Louis XII.," said a third.

Christophe pretended not to hear, and tried to exaggerate his amazement, the result being that his silly attitude and his behavior before the guard proved an excellent passport to the eyes of Pardaillan.

"The queen has not yet risen," said the young captain; "come and wait for her in the _salle des gardes_."

Christophe followed Pardaillan rather slowly. On the way he stopped to admire the pretty gallery in the form of an arcade, where the courtiers of Louis XII. awaited the reception-hour when it rained, and where, at the present moment, were several seigneurs attached to the Guises; for the staircase (so well preserved to the present day) which led to their apartments is at the end of this gallery in a tower, the architecture of which commends itself to the admiration of intelligent beholders.

"Well, well! did you come here to study the carving of images?" cried Pardaillan, as Christophe stopped before the charming sculptures of the balustrade which unites, or, if you prefer it, separates the columns of each arcade.

Christophe followed the young officer to the grand staircase, not without a glance of ecstasy at the semi-Moorish tower. The weather was fine, and the court was crowded with staff-officers and seigneurs, talking together in little groups,--their dazzling uniforms and court-dresses brightening a spot which the marvels of architecture, then fresh and new, had already made so brilliant.

"Come in here," said Pardaillan, making Lecamus a sign to follow him through a carved wooden door leading to the second floor, which the door-keeper opened on recognizing the young officer.

It is easy to imagine Christophe's amazement as he entered the great _salle des gardes_, then so vast that military necessity has since divided it by a partition into two chambers. It occupied on the second floor (that of the king), as did the corresponding hall on the first floor (that of the queen-mother), one third of the whole front of the chateau facing the courtyard; and it was lighted by two windows to right and two to left of the tower in which the famous staircase winds up. The young captain went to the door of the royal chamber, which opened upon this vast hall, and told one of the two pages on duty to inform Madame Dayelles, the queen's bedchamber woman, that the furrier was in the hall with her surcoat.

On a sign from Pardaillan Christophe placed himself near an officer, who was seated on a stool at the corner of a fireplace as large as his father's whole shop, which was at the end of the great hall, opposite to a precisely similar fireplace at the other end. While talking to this officer, a lieutenant, he contrived to interest him with an account of the stagnation of trade. Christophe seemed so thoroughly a shopkeeper that the officer imparted that conviction to the captain of the Scotch guard, who came in from the courtyard to question Lecamus, all the while watching him covertly and narrowly.

However much Christophe Lecamus had been warned, it was impossible for him to really apprehend the cold ferocity of the interests between which Chaudieu had slipped him. To an observer of this scene, who had known the secrets of it as the historian understands it in the light of to-day, there was indeed cause to tremble for this young man,--the hope of two families,--thrust between those powerful and pitiless machines, Catherine and the Guises. But do courageous beings, as a rule, measure the full extent of their dangers? By the way in which the port of Blois, the chateau, and the town were guarded, Christophe was prepared to find spies and traps everywhere; and he therefore resolved to conceal the importance of his mission and the tension of his mind under the empty-headed and shopkeeping appearance with which he presented himself to the eyes of young Pardaillan, the officer of the guard, and the Scottish captain.

The agitation which, in a royal castle, always attends the hour of the king's rising, was beginning to show itself. The great lords, whose horses, pages, or grooms remained in the outer courtyard,--for no one, except the king and the queens, had the right to enter the inner courtyard on horseback,--were mounting by groups the magnificent staircase, and filling by degrees the vast hall, the beams of which are now stripped of the decorations that then adorned them. Miserable little red tiles have replaced the ingenious mosaics of the floors; and the thick walls, then draped with the crown tapestries and glowing with all the arts of that unique period of the splendors of humanity, are now denuded and whitewashed! Reformers and Catholics were pressing in to hear the news and to watch faces, quite as much as to pay their duty to the king. Francois II.'s excessive love for Mary Stuart, to which neither the queen-mother nor the Guises made any opposition, and the politic compliance of Mary Stuart herself, deprived the king of all regal power. At seventeen years of age he knew nothing of royalty but its pleasures, or of marriage beyond the indulgence of first passion. As a matter of fact, all present paid their court to Queen Mary and to her uncles, the Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise, rather than to the king.

This stir took place before Christophe, who watched the arrival of each new personage with natural eagerness. A magnificent portiere, on either side of which stood two pages and two soldiers of the Scotch guard, then on duty, showed him the entrance to the royal chamber,--the chamber so fatal to the son of the present Duc de Guise, the second Balafre, who fell