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

>a rival, did your husband persist in surviving your affection for him,

did those from whom you had expectations cling obstinately and

inconsiderately to life, the witches by incantations and the use of

powders - in which arsenic was the dominant charm - could usually

put the matter right for you. Indeed, so wide and general was the

practice of poisoning become, that the authorities, lately aroused

to the fact by the sensational revelations of the Marchioness de

Brinvilliers, had set up in this year 1670 the tribunal known as

the Chambre Ardente to inquire into the matter, and to conduct

prosecutions.

 

La Voisin promised help to the Marchioness. She called in another

witch of horrible repute, named La Filastre, her coadjutor Lesage,

and two expert poisoners, Romani and Bertrand, who devised an

ingenious plot for the murder of the Duchess of Fontanges. They

were to visit her, Romani as a cloth merchant, and Bertrand as his

servant, to offer her their wares, including some Grenoble gloves,

which were the most beautiful gloves in the world and unfailingly

irresistible to ladies. These gloves they prepared in accordance

with certain magical recipes in such a way that the Duchess, after

wearing them, must die a lingering death in which there could be no

suspicion of poisoning.

 

The King was to be dealt with by means of a petition steeped in

similar powders, and should receive his death by taking it into his

hands. La Voisin herself was to go to Saint-Germain to present

this petition on Monday, March 13th, one of those days on which,

according to ancient custom, all comers were admitted to the royal

presence.

 

Thus they disposed. But Fate was already silently stalking La

Voisin.

 

It is to the fact that an obscure and vulgar woman had drunk one

glass of wine too many three months earlier that the King owed his

escape.

 

If you are interested in the almost grotesque disparity that can

lie between cause and effect, here is a subject for you. Three

months earlier a tailor named Vigoureux, whose wife secretly

practised magic, had entertained a few friends to dinner, amongst

whom was an intimate of his wife’s, named Marie Bosse. This Marie

Bosse it was who drank that excessive glass of wine which, drowning

prudence, led her to boast of the famous trade she drove as a

fortuneteller to the nobility, and even to hint of something

further.

 

“Another three poisonings,” she chuckled, “and I shall retire with

my fortune made!”

 

An attorney who was present pricked up his ears, bethought him of

the tales that were afloat, and gave information to the police.

The police set a trap for Marie Bosse, and she betrayed herself.

Later, under torture, she betrayed La Vigoureux. La Vigoureux

betrayed others, and these others again.

 

The arrest of Marie Bosse was like knocking down the first of a row

of ninepins, but none could have suspected that the last of these

stood in the royal apartments.

 

On the day before she was to repair to Saint-Germain, La Voisin,

betrayed in her turn, received a surprise visit from the police -

who, of course, had no knowledge of the regicide their action was

thwarting - and she was carried off to the Chatelet. Put to the

question, she revealed a great deal; but her terror of the horrible

punishment reserved for regicides prevented her to the day of her

death at the stake - in February of 1680 from saying a word of her

association with Madame de Montespan.

 

But there were others whom she betrayed under torture, and whose

arrest followed quickly upon her own, who had not her strength of

character. Among these were La Filastre and the magician Lesage.

When it was found that these two corroborated each other in the

incredible things which they related, the Chambre Ardente took

fright. La Reynie, who presided over it, laid the matter before

the King, and the King, horror-stricken by the discovery of the

revolting practices in which the mother of his children had been

engaged, suspended the sittings of the Chambre Ardente, and

commanded that no further proceedings should be taken against Lesage

and La Filastre, and none initiated against Romani, Bertrand, the

Abbe Guibourg, and the scores of other poisoners and magicians who

had been arrested, and who were acquainted with Madame de Montespan’s

unholy traffic.

 

But it was not out of any desire to spare Madame de Montespan that

the King proceeded in this manner; he was concerned only to spare

himself and his royal dignity. He feared above all things the

scandal and ridicule which must touch him as a result of publicity,

and because he feared it so much, he could impose no punishment

upon Madame de Montespan.

 

This he made known to her at the interview between them procured by

his minister Louvois, at about the time that the sittings of the

Chambre Ardente were suspended.

 

To this interview that proud, domineering woman came in dread, and

in tears and humility for once. The King’s bearing was cold and

hard. Cold and hard were the words in which he declared the extent

of his knowledge of her infamy, words which revealed the loathing

and disgust this knowledge brought him. If at first she was

terror-stricken, crushed under the indictment, yet she was never of

a temper to bear reproaches long. Under his scorn her anger kindled

and her humility was sloughed.

 

“What then?” she cried at last, eyes aflash through lingering tears.

“Is the blame all mine? If all this is true, it is no less true

that I was driven to it by my love for you and the despair to which

your heartlessness and infidelity reduced me. To you,” she

continued, gathering force at every word, “I sacrificed everything

- my honour, a noble husband who loved me, all that a woman prizes.

And what did you give me in exchange? Your cruel fickleness exposed

me to the low mockery of the lick-spittles of your Court. Do you

wonder that I went mad, and that in my madness I sacrificed what

shreds of self-respect you had left me? And now it seems I have

lost all but life. Take that, too, if it be your pleasure. Heaven

knows it has little value left for me! But remember that in

striking me you strike the mother of your children - the legitimate

children of France. Remember that!”

 

He remembered it. Indeed, he was never in danger of forgetting it;

for she might have added that he would be striking also at himself

and at that royal dignity which was his religion. And so that all

scandalous comment might be avoided she was actually allowed to

remain at Court, although no longer in her first-floor apartments;

and it was not until ten years later that she departed to withdraw

to the community of Saint Joseph.

 

But even in her disgrace this woman, secretly convicted among other

abominations of attempting to procure the poisoning of the King and

of her rival, enjoyed an annual pension of 1,200,000 livres; whilst

none dared proceed against those who shared her guilt - not even

the infamous Guibourg, the poisoners Romani and Bertrand, and La

Filastre - nor yet against some scores of associates of these, who

were known to live by sorcery and poisonings, and who might be

privy to the part played by Madame de Montespan in that horrible

night of magic at the Chateau de Villebousin.

 

The hot blast of revolution was needed to sweep France clean.

 

VII. THE NIGHT OF GEMS

 

THE “AFFAIRS” OF THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE

 

Under the stars of a tepid, scented night of August of 1784, Prince

Louis de Rohan, Cardinal of Strasbourg, Grand Almoner of France,

made his way with quickened pulses through the Park of Versailles

to a momentous assignation in the Grove of Venus.

 

This illustrious member of an illustrious House, that derived from

both the royal lines of Valois and Bourbon, was a man in the prime

of life, of a fine height, still retaining something of the willowy

slenderness that had been his in youth, and of a gentle, almost

womanly beauty of countenance.

 

In a grey cloak and a round, grey hat with gold cords, followed

closely by two shadowy attendant figures, he stepped briskly amain,

eager to open those gates across the path of his ambition, locked

against him hitherto by the very hands from which he now went to

receive the key.

 

He deserves your sympathy, this elegant Cardinal-Prince, who had been

the victim of the malice and schemings of the relentless Austrian

Empress since the days when he represented the King of France at the

Court of Vienna.

 

The state he had kept there had been more than royal and royal in

the dazzling French manner, which was perturbing to a woman of

Marie Therese’s solid German notions. His hunting-parties, his

supper-parties, the fetes he gave upon every occasion, the worldly

inventiveness, the sumptuousness and reckless extravagance that

made each of these affairs seem like a supplement to “The Arabian

Nights’ Entertainments,” the sybaritic luxury of his surroundings,

the incredible prodigality of his expenditure, all served profoundly

to scandalize and embitter the Empress.

 

That a priest in gay, secular clothes should hunt the stag on

horseback filled her with horror at his levity; that he should flirt

discreetly with the noble ladies of Vienna made her despair of his

morals; whilst his personal elegance and irresistible charm were

proofs to her of a profligacy that perverted the Court over which

she ruled.

 

She laboured for the extinction of his pernicious brilliance, and

intrigued for his recall. She made no attempt to conceal her

hostility, nor did she love him any the better because he met her

frigid haughtiness with an ironical urbanity that seemed ever to

put her in the wrong. And then one day he permitted his wit to be

bitingly imprudent.

 

“Marie Therese,” he wrote to D’Aiguillon, “holds in one hand a

handkerchief to receive her tears for the misfortunes of oppressed

Poland, and in the other a sword to continue its partition.”

 

To say that in this witticism lay one of the causes of the French

Revolution may seem at first glance an outrageous overstatement.

Yet it is certain that, but for that imprudent phrase, the need

would never have arisen that sent Rohan across the Park of Versailles

on that August night to an assignation that in the sequel was to

place a terrible weapon in the hands of the Revolutionary party.

 

D’Aiguillon had published the gibe. It had reached the ears of

Marie Antoinette, and from her it had travelled back to her mother

in Vienna. It aroused in the Empress a resentment and a bitterness

that did not rest until the splendid Cardinal-Prince was recalled

from his embassy. It did not rest even then. By the ridicule to

which the gibe exposed her - and if you know Marie Therese at all,

you can imagine what that meant - it provoked a hostility that was

indefatigably to labour against him.

 

The Cardinal was ambitious, he had confidence in his talents and in

the driving force of his mighty family, and he looked to become

another Richelieu or Mazarin, the first Minister of the Crown, the

empurpled ruler of France, the guiding power behind the throne. All

this he looked confidently to achieve; all this he might have

achieved but for the obstacle that Marie Therese’s resentment flung

across his path. The Empress saw to it that, through the person of

her daughter, her hatred should pursue him even into France.

 

Obedient ever to the iron will of her mother, sharing her mother’s

resentment, Marie Antoinette exerted all her influence to thwart

this Cardinal