The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Rafael Sabatini [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

>garrisons Huguenot cities,” said Biragues. “That is a very

dangerous type of subject, Sire.”

 

“A subject who forces you into war with Protestant Flanders against

Catholic Spain,” added the blunt Tavannes.

 

“Forces me?” roared the King, half rising, his eyes aflash. “That

is a very daring word.”

 

“It would be if the proof were absent. Remember, Sire, his very

speech to you before you permitted him to embark upon preparations

for this war. ‘Give us leave,’ he said, ‘to make war in Flanders,

or we shall be compelled to make war upon yourself.’”

 

The King winced and turned livid. Sweat stood in beads upon his

brow. He was touched in his most sensitive spot. That speech of

Coligny’s was of all things the one he most desired to forget. He

twisted the chaplet so that the beads bit deeply into his fingers.

 

“Sire,” Tavannes continued, “were I a king, and did a subject so

address me, I should have his head within the hour. Yet worse has

happened since, worse is happening now. The Huguenots are arming.

They ride arrogantly through the streets of your capital, stirring

up rebellion. They are here in force, and the danger grows acute

and imminent.”

 

Charles writhed before them. He mopped his brow with a shaking

hand.

 

“The danger - yes. I see that. I admit the danger. But Coligny - “

 

“Is it to be King Gaspard or King Charles?” rasped the voice of

Catherine.

 

The chaplet snapped suddenly in the King’s fingers. He sprang to

his feet, deathly pale.

 

“So be it!” he cried. “Since it is necessary to kill the Admiral,

kill him, then. Kill him!” he screamed, in a fury that seemed

aimed at those who forced this course upon him. “Kill him - but

see to it also that at the same time you kill every Huguenot in

France, so that not one shall be left to reproach me. Not one, do

you hear? Take your measures and let the thing be done at once.”

And on that, his face livid and twitching, his limbs shaking, he

flung out of the room and left them.

 

It was all the warrant they required, and they set to work at once

there in the King’s own cabinet, where he had left them. Guise,

who had hitherto been no more than a silent spectator, assumed now

the most active part. Upon his own shoulders he took the charge

of seeing the Admiral done to death.

 

The remainder of the day and a portion of the evening were spent in

concerting ways and means. They assured themselves of the Provost

of the merchants of Paris, of the officers of the Gardes Francaises

and the three thousand Swiss, of the Captains of the quarters

and other notoriously factious persons who could be trusted as

leaders. By ten o’clock at night all preparations were made and it

was agreed that the ringing of the bell of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois

for matins was to be the signal for the massacre.

 

A gentleman of the Admiral’s household taking his way homeward that

night passed several men bearing sheaves of pikes upon their

shoulders, and never suspected whom these weapons were to arm. He

met several small companies of soldiers marching quietly, their

weapons shouldered, their matches glowing, and still he suspected

nothing, whilst in one quarter he stopped to watch a man whose

behaviour seemed curious, and discovered that he was chalking a

white cross upon the doors of certain houses.

 

Meeting soon afterwards another man with a bundle of weapons on his

shoulder, the intrigued Huguenot gentleman asked him bluntly what

he carried and whither he went.

 

“It is for the divertissement at the Louvre tonight,” he was answered.

 

But in the Louvre the Queen-Mother and the Catholic leaders, the

labours of preparation ended, were snatching a brief rest. Between

two and three o’clock in the morning Catherine and Anjou repaired

again to the King’s cabinet. They found him waiting there, his face

haggard and his eyes fevered.

 

He had spent a part of the evening at billiards, and among the

players had been La Rochefoucauld, of whom he was fond, and who had

left him with a jest at eleven o’clock, little dreaming that it was

for the last time.

 

The three of them crossed to the window overlooking the river. They

opened it, and peered out fearfully. Even Catherine trembled now

that the hour approached. The air was fresh and cool, swept clean

by the stirring breeze of the dawn, whose first ghostly gleams were

already in the sky. Suddenly, somewhere near at hand, a pistol

cracked. The noise affected them oddly. The King fell into an ague

and his teeth chattered audibly. Panic seized him.

 

“By the Blood, it shall not be! It shall not be!” he cried suddenly.

 

He looked at his mother and his brother and they looked at him;

ghastly were the faces of all three, their eyes wide and staring

with horror.

 

Charles swore in his terror that he would cancel all commands. And

since Catherine and Anjou made no attempt to hinder him, he

summoned an officer and bade him seek out the Duke of Guise at once

and command him to stay his hand.

 

The messenger eventually found the Duke in the courtyard of the

Admiral’s house, standing over the Admiral’s dead body, which his

assassins had flung down from the bedroom window. Guise laughed,

and stirred the head of the corpse with his foot, answering that

the message came too late. Even as he spoke the great bell of

Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois began to ring for matins.

 

The royal party huddled at that window of the Louvre heard it at

the same moment, and heard, as if in immediate answer, shots of

arquebus and pistol, cries and screams near at hand, and then,

gradually swelling from a murmur, the baying of the fierce multitude.

Other bells gave tongue, until from every steeple in Paris the alarm

rang out. The red glow from thousands of torches flushed the heavens

with a rosy tint as of dawn, the air grew heavy with the smell of

pitch and resin.

 

The King, clutching the sill of the window, poured out a stream of

blasphemy from between his chattering teeth. Then the hubbub rose

suddenly near at hand. The neighbourhood of the Louvre was

populous with Huguenots, and into it now poured the excited Catholic

citizens and soldiers. Soon the quay beneath the palace windows

presented the fiercest spectacle of any quarter, of Paris.

 

Half-clad men, women, and children fled screaming before the

assassins, until they were checked by the chains that everywhere

had been placed across the streets. Some sought the river, hoping

to find a way of escape. But with Satanic foresight, the boats

usually moored there had been conveyed to the other side. Thus

some hundreds of Huguenots were brought to bay, and done to death

under the very eyes of the King who had unleashed this horror.

Doors were crashed open, flames rose to heaven, men and women were

shot down under the palace wall, bodies were flung from windows,

and on every side - in the words of D’Aubigne - the blood now

flowed, seeking the river.

 

The King watched a while, screams and curses pouring from his lips

to be lost in the horrible uproar. He turned, perhaps to upbraid

his mother and his brother, but found that they were no longer at

his side. Behind him in the room a page was crouching, watching

him with a white, horrified face.

 

Suddenly the King laughed - it was the fierce, hysterical laugh of

a madman. His eyes fell on the arquebuses flanking the picture of

the Mother of Mercy. He took one of them down, then caught the boy

by the collar of his doublet and dragged him forward to the window.

 

“Hither, and load for me!” he bade him, between peals of his

terrible laughter. Then he levelled the weapon across the sill of

the window. “Parpaillots! Parpaillots!” he screamed. “Kill!

Kill!” and he discharged the arquebus into a fleeing group of

Huguenots.

 

Five days later, the King - who by now had thrown the blame of the

whole affair, with its slaughter of some two thousand Huguenots,

upon the Guises and their hatred of Coligny - rode out to Montfaucon

to behold the decapitated body of the Admiral, which hung from the

gallows in chains. A courtier of a poor but obtrusive wit leaned

towards him.

 

“The Admiral becomes noisome, I think,” he said.

 

The King’s green eyes considered him, his lips curling grimly.

 

“The body of a dead enemy always smells sweet,” he said.

 

VI. THE NIGHT OF WITCHCRAFT

 

LOUIS XIV AND MADAME DE MONTESPAN

 

If you scrape the rubbish-heap of servile, coeval flattery that

usually smothers the personality of a monarch, you will discover a

few kings who have been truly great; many who have achieved

greatness because they were wisely content to serve as masks for

the great intellects of their time; and, for the rest, some bad

kings, some foolish kings, and some ridiculous kings. But in all

that royal gallery of history you will hardly find a more truly

absurd figure than that of the resplendent Roi Soleil, the Grand

Monarque, the Fourteenth Louis of France.

 

I am not aware that he has ever been laughed at; certainly never

to the extent which he deserves. The flatterers of his day,

inevitable products of his reign, did their work so thoroughly that

even in secret they do not appear to have dared to utter - possibly

they did not even dare to think - the truth about him. Their work

survives, and when you have assessed the monstrous flattery at its

true worth, swept it aside and come down to the real facts of his

life, you make the discovery that the proudest title their

sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity accept - Le Roi Soleil,

the SunKing - makes him what indeed he is: a king of opera bouffe.

There is about him at times something almost reminiscent of the

Court buffoons of a century before, who puffed themselves out with

mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excite laughter; with

this difference, however, that in his own case it was not intended

to be amusing.

 

A heartless voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to

wrap himself in what Saint-Simon has called a “terrible majesty.”

Hewas obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity - of

kingship. I cannot believe that he conceived himself human. He

appears to have held that being king was very like being God, and

he duped the world by ceremonials of etiquette that were very

nearly sacramental. We find him burdening the most simple and

personal acts of everyday life with a succession of rites of an

amazing complexity. Thus, when he rose in the morning, princes of

the blood and the first gentlemen of France were in attendance: one

to present to him his stockings, another to proffer on bended knee

the royal garters, a third to perform the ceremony of handing him

his wig, and so on until the toilette of his plump, not unhandsome

person was complete. You miss the incense, you feel that some

noble thurifer should have fumigated him at each stage. Perhaps

he never thought of it.

 

The evil fruits of his reign - evil, that is to say, from the point

of view of his order, which was swept away as so much anachronistic

rubbish - did not come until a hundred years later. In his own day

France was great, and this not because but in spite of him. After

all, he was not