From the Memoirs of a Minister of France
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Stanley Weyman >> From the Memoirs of a Minister of France
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I allowed him to go on in this strain for some time, and then,
having sufficiently diverted myself with his forebodings, I bade
him in an altered voice to take courage. "For I think I know," I
said, "where your son is."
"At Madame's?" he groaned.
"No; here," I said.
"MON DIEU! Where?" he cried. And he sprang up, startled out of
his lamentations.
"Here; in my lodging," I answered.
"My son is here?" he said.
"In the next room," I replied, smiling indulgently at his
astonishment, which was only less amusing than his terror. "I
have but to touch this bell, and Maignan will bring him to you."
Full of wonder and admiration, he implored me to ring and have
him brought immediately; since until he had set eyes on him he
could not feel safe. Accordingly I rang my hand-bell, and
Maignan opened the door. "The clockmaker," I said nodding.
He looked at me stupidly. "The clock-maker, your excellency?"
"Yes; bring him in," I said.
"But--he has gone!" he exclaimed.
"Gone?" I cried, scarcely able to believe my ears. "Gone,
sirrah! and I told you to detain him!"
"Until he had mended the clock, my lord," Maignan stammered,
quite out of countenance. "But he set it going half-an-hour ago;
and I let him go, according to your order."
It is in the face of such CONTRETEMPS as these that the low-bred
man betrays himself. Yet such was my chagrin on this occasion,
and so sudden the shock, that it was all I could do to maintain
my SANGFROID, and, dismissing Maignan with a look, be content to
punish M. de Perrot with a sneer. "I did not know that your son
was a tradesman," I said. He wrung his hands. "He has low
tastes," he cried. "He always had. He has amused himself that
way, And now by this time he is with Madame de Beaufort and we
are undone!"
"Not we," I answered curtly; "speak for yourself, M. de Perrot."
But though, having no mind to appear in his eyes dependent on
Madame's favour or caprice, I thus checked his familiarity, I am
free to confess that my calmness was partly assumed; and that,
though I knew my position to be unassailable--based as it was on
solid services rendered to the King, my master, and on the
familiar affection with which he honoured me through so many
years--I could not view the prospect of a fresh collision with
Madame without some misgiving. Having gained the mastery in the
two quarrels we had had, I was the less inclined to excite her to
fresh intrigues; and as unwilling to give the King reason to
think that we could not live at peace. Accordingly, after a
moment's consideration, I told Perrot that, rather than he should
suffer, I would go to Madame de Beaufort myself, and give such
explanations as would place another complexion on the matter.
He overwhelmed me with thanks, and, besides, to show his
gratitude--for he was still on thorns, picturing her wrath and
resentment he insisted on accompanying me to the Cloitre de St.
Germain, where Madame had her apartment. By the way, he asked me
what I should say to her.
"Whatever will get you out of the scrape," I answered curtly.
"Then anything!" he cried with fervour. "Anything, my dear
friend. Oh, that unnatural boy!"
"I suppose that the girl is as big a fool?" I said.
"Bigger! bigger!" he answered. "I don't know where she learned
such things!"
"She prated of love, too, then?"
"To be sure," he groaned, "and without a sou of DOT!"
"Well, well," I said, "here we are. I will do what I can."
Fortunately the King was not there, and Madame would receive me.
I thought, indeed, that her doors flew open with suspicious
speed, and that way was made for me more easily than usual; and I
soon found that I was not wrong in the inference I drew from
these facts. For when I entered her chamber that remarkable
woman, who, whatever her enemies may say, combined with her
beauty a very uncommon degree of sense and discretion, met me
with a low courtesy and a smile of derision. "So," she said, "M.
de Rosny, not satisfied with furnishing me with evidence, gives
me proof."
"How, Madame?" I said; though I well understood.
"By his presence here," she answered. "An hour ago," she
continued, "the King was with me. I had not then the slightest
ground to expect this honour, or I am sure that his Majesty would
have stayed to share it. But I have since seen reason to expect
it, and you observe that I am not unprepared."
She spoke with a sparkling eye, and an expression of the most
lively resentment; so that, had M. de Perrot been in my place I
think that he would have shed more tears. I was myself somewhat
dashed, though I knew the prudence that governed her in her most
impetuous sallies; still, to avoid the risk of hearing things
which we might both afterwards wish unsaid, I came to the point.
"I fear that I have timed my visit ill, Madame," I said. "You
have some complaint against me."
"Only that you are like the others," she answered with a fine
contempt. "You profess one thing and do another."
"As for example?"
"For example!" she replied, with a scornful laugh. "How many
times have you told me that you left women, and intrigues in
which women had part, on one side?"
I bowed.
"And now I find you--you and that Perrot, that creature!--
intriguing against me; intriguing with some country chit to--"
"Madame!" I said, cutting her short with a show of temper,
"where did you get this?"
"Do you deny it?" she cried, looking so beautiful in her anger
that I thought I had never seen her to such advantage. "Do you
deny that you took the King there?"
"No. Certainly I took the King there."
"To Perrot's? You admit it?"
"Certainly," I said, "for a purpose."
"A purpose!" she cried with withering scorn. "Was it not that
the King might see that girl?"
"Yes," I replied patiently, "it was."
She stared at me. "And you can tell me that to my face!" she
said.
"I see no reason why I should not, Madame," I replied easily--"I
cannot conceive why you should object to the union--and many why
you should desire to see two people happy. Otherwise, if I had
had any idea, even the slightest, that the matter was obnoxious
to you, I would not have engaged in it."
"But--what was your purpose then?" she muttered, in a different
tone.
"To obtain the King's good word with M. de Perrot to permit the
marriage of his son with his niece; who is, unfortunately,
without a portion."
Madame uttered a low exclamation, and her eyes wandering from me,
she took up--as if her thoughts strayed also--a small ornament;
from the table beside her. "Ah!" she said, looking at it
closely. "But Perrot's son did he know of this?"
"No," I answered, smiling. "But I have heard that women can love
as well as men, Madame. And sometimes ingenuously."
I heard her draw a sigh of relief, and I knew that if I had not
persuaded her I had accomplished much. I was not surprised when,
laying down the ornament with which she had been toying, she
turned on me one of those rare smiles to which the King could
refuse nothing; and wherein wit, tenderness, and gaiety were so
happily blended that no conceivable beauty of feature, uninspired
by sensibility, could vie with them. "Good friend, I have
sinned," she said. "But I am a woman, and I love. Pardon me.
As for your PROTEGEE, from this moment she is mine also. I will
speak to the King this evening; and if he does not at once,"
Madame continued, with a gleam of archness that showed me that
she was not yet free from suspicion, "issue his commands to M. de
Perrot, I shall know what to think; and his Majesty will
suffer!"
I thanked her profusely, and in fitting terms. Then, after a
word or two about some assignments for the expenses of her
household, in settling which there had been delay--a matter
wherein, also, I contrived to do her pleasure and the King's
service no wrong--I very willingly took my leave, and, calling my
people, started homewards on foot. I had not gone twenty paces,
however, before M. de Perrot, whose impatience had chained him to
the spot, crossed the street and joined himself to me. "My dear
friend," he cried, embracing me fervently, "is all well?"
"Yes," I said.
"She is appeased?"
"Absolutely."
He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and, almost crying in his joy,
began to thank me, with all the extravagance of phrase and
gesture to which men of his mean spirit are prone. Through all I
heard him silently, and with secret amusement, knowing that the
end was not yet. At length he asked me what explanation I had
given.
"The only explanation possible," I answered bluntly. "I had to
combat Madame's jealousy. I did it in the only way in which it
could be done: by stating that your niece loved your son, and by
imploring her good word on their behalf."
He sprang a pace from me with a cry of rage and astonishment.
"You did that?" he screamed.
"Softly, softly, M. de Perrot," I said, in a voice which brought
him somewhat to his senses. "Certainly I did. You bade me say
whatever was necessary, and I did so. No more. If you wish,
however," I added grimly, "to explain to Madame that--"
But with a wail of lamentation he rushed from me, and in a moment
was lost in the darkness; leaving me to smile at this odd
termination of an intrigue that, but for a lad's adroitness,
might have altered the fortunes not of M. de Perrot only but of
the King my master and of France.
II. THE TENNIS BALLS.
A few weeks before the death of the Duchess of Beaufort, on
Easter Eve, 1599, made so great a change in the relations of all
at Court that "Sourdis mourning" came to be a phrase for grief,
genuine because interested, an affair that might have had a
serious issue began, imperceptibly at the time, in the veriest
trifle.
One day, while the King was still absent from Paris, I had a mind
to play tennis, and for that purpose summoned La Trape, who had
the charge of my balls, and sometimes, in the absence of better
company, played with me. Of late the balls he bought had given
me small satisfaction, and I bade him bring me the bag, that I
might choose the best. He did so, and I had not handled half-a-
dozen before I found one, and later three others, so much more
neatly sewn than the rest, and in all points so superior, that
even an untrained eye could not fail to detect the difference.
"Look, man!" I said, holding out one of these for his
inspection. "These are balls; the rest are rubbish. Cannot you
see the difference? Where did you buy these? At Constant's?"
He muttered, "No, my lord," and looked confused.
This roused my curiosity. "Where, then?" I said sharply.
"Of a man who was at the gate yesterday."
"Oh!" I said. "Selling tennis balls?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Some rogue of a marker," I exclaimed, "from whom you bought
filched goods! Who was it, man?"
"I don't know his name," La Trape answered. "He was a Spaniard."
"Well?"
"Who wanted to have an audience of your excellency."
"Ho!" I said drily. "Now I understand. Bring me your book.
Or, tell me, what have you charged me for these balls?"
"Two francs," he muttered reluctantly.
"And never gave a sou, I'll swear!" I retorted. "You took the
poor devil's balls, and left him at the gate! Ay, it is rogues
like you get me a bad name!" I continued, affecting more anger
than I felt--for, in truth, I was rather pleased with my
quickness in discovering the cheat. "You steal and I bear the
blame, and pay to boot! Off with you and find the fellow, and
bring him to me, or it will be the worse for you!"
Glad to escape so easily, La Trape ran to the gate; but he failed
to find his friend, and two or three days elapsed before I
thought again of the matter, such petty rogueries being ingrained
in a great man's VALETAILLE, and being no more to be removed than
the hairs from a man's arm. At the end of that time La Trape
came to me, bringing the Spaniard; who had appeared again at the
gate. The stranger proved to be a small, slight man, pale and
yet brown, with quick-glancing eyes. His dress was decent, but
very poor, with more than one rent neatly darned. He made me a
profound reverence, and stood waiting, with his cap in his hand,
to be addressed; but, with all his humility, I did not fail to
detect an easiness of deportment and a propriety that did not
seem absolutely strange since he was a Spaniard, but which struck
me, nevertheless, as requiring some explanation. I asked him,
civilly, who he was. He answered that his name was Diego.
"You speak French?"
"I am of Guipuzcoa, my lord," he answered, "where we sometimes
speak three tongues."
"That is true," I said. "And it is your trade to make tennis
balls?"
"No, my lord; to use them," he answered with a certain dignity.
"You are a player, then?"
"If it please your excellency."
"Where have you played?"
"At Madrid, where I was the keeper of the Duke of Segovia's
court; and at Toledo, where I frequently had the honour of
playing against M. de Montserrat."
"You are a good player?"
"If your excellency," he answered impulsively, "will give me an
opportunity--"
"Softly, softly," I said, somewhat taken aback by his
earnestness. "Granted that you are a player, you seem to have
played to small purpose.. Why are you here, my friend, and not in
Madrid?"
He drew up his sleeves, and showed me that his wrists were deeply
scarred.
I shrugged my shoulders. "You have been in the hands of the Holy
Brotherhood?" I said.
"No, my lord," he answered bitterly. "Of the Holy Inquisition."
"You are a Protestant?"
He bowed.
On that I fell to considering him with more attention, but at the
same time with some distrust; reflecting that he was a Spaniard,
and recalling the numberless plots against his Majesty of which
that nation had been guilty. Still, if his tale were true he
deserved support; with a view therefore to testing this I
questioned him farther, and learned that he had for a long time
disguised his opinions, until, opening them in an easy moment to
a fellow servant, he found himself upon the first occasion of
quarrel betrayed to the Fathers. After suffering much, and
giving himself up for lost in their dungeons, he made his escape
in a manner sufficiently remarkable, if I might believe his
story. In the prison with him lay a Moor, for whose exchange
against a Christian taken by the Sallee pirates an order came
down. It arrived in the evening; the Moor was to be removed in
the morning. An hour after the arrival of the news, however, and
when the two had just been locked up for the night, the Moor,
overcome with excess of joy, suddenly expired. At first the
Spaniard was for giving the alarm; but, being an ingenious
fellow, in a few minutes he summoned all his wits together and
made a plan. Contriving to blacken his face and hands with
charcoal he changed clothes with the corpse, and muffling himself
up after the fashion of the Moors in a cold climate he succeeded
in the early morning in passing out in his place. Those who had
charge of him had no reason to expect an escape, and once on the
road he had little difficulty in getting away, and eventually
reached France after a succession of narrow chances.
All this the man told me so simply that I knew not which to
admire more, the daring of his device--since for a white man to
pass for a brown is beyond the common scope of such disguises--or
his present modesty in relating it. However, neither of these
things seemed to my mind a good reason for disbelief. As to the
one, I considered that an impostor would have put forward
something more simple; and as to the other, I have all my life
long observed that those who have had strange experiences tell
them in a very ordinary way. Besides, I had fresh in my mind the
diverting escape of the Duke of Nemours from Lyons, which I have
elsewhere related. On the other hand, and despite all these
things, the story might be false; so with a view to testing one
part of it, at least, I bade him come and play with me that
afternoon.
"My lord," he said bluntly, "I had rather not. For if I defeat
your excellency, I may defeat also your good intentions. And if
I permit you to win, I shall seem to be an impostor."
Somewhat surprised by his forethought, I reassured him on this
point; and his game, which proved to be one of remarkable
strength and finesse, and fairly on an equality, as it seemed to
me, with that of the best French players, persuaded me that at
any rate the first part of his tale was true. Accordingly I made
him a present, and, in addition, bade Maignan pay him a small
allowance for a while. For this he showed his gratitude by
attaching himself to my household; and as it was the fashion at
that time to keep tennis masters of this class, I found it
occasionally amusing to pit him against other well-known players.
In the course of a few weeks he gained me great credit; and
though I am not so foolish as to attach importance to such
trifles, but, on the contrary, think an old soldier who stood
fast at Coutras, or even a clerk who has served the King
honestly--if such a prodigy there be--more deserving than these
professors, still I do not err on the other side; but count him a
fool who, because he has solid cause to value himself, disdains
the ECLAT which the attachment of such persons gives him in the
public eye.
The man went by the name of Diego the Spaniard, and his story,
which gradually became known, together with the excellence of his
play, made him so much the fashion that more than one tried to
detach him from my service. The King heard of him, and would
have played with him, but the sudden death of Madame de Beaufort,
which occurred soon afterwards, threw the Court into mourning;
and for a while, in pursuing the negotiations for the King's
divorce, and in conducting a correspondence of the most delicate
character with the Queen, I lost sight of my player--insomuch,
that I scarcely knew whether he still formed part of my suite or
not.
My attention was presently recalled to him, however, in a rather
remarkable manner. One morning Don Antonio d'Evora, Secretary to
the Spanish Embassy, and a brother of that d'Evora who commanded
the Spanish Foot at Paris in '94, called on me at the Arsenal, to
which I had just removed, and desired to see me. I bade them
admit him; but as my secretaries were at the time at work with
me, I left them and received him in the garden--supposing that
he wished to speak to me, about the affair of Saluces, and
preferring, like the King my master, to talk of matters of State
in the open air.
However, I was mistaken. Don Antonio said nothing about Savoy,
but after the usual preliminaries, which a Spaniard never omits,
plunged into a long harangue upon the comity which, now that
peace reigned, should exist between the two nations. For some
time I waited patiently to learn what he would be at; but he
seemed to be lost in his own eloquence, and at last I took him
up.
"All this is very well, M. d'Evora," I said. "I quite agree with
you that the times are changed, that amity is not the same thing
as war, and that a grain of sand in the eye is unpleasant," for
he had said all of these things. "But I fail, being a plain man
and no diplomatist, to see what you want me to do."
"It is the smallest matter," he said, waving his hand gracefully.
"And yet," I retorted, "you seem to find a difficulty in coming
at it."
"As you do at the grain of sand in the eye," he answered wittily.
"After all, however, in what you say, M. de Rosny, there is some
truth. I feel that I am, on delicate ground; but I am sure that
you will pardon me. You have in your suite a certain Diego."
"It may be so," I said, masking my surprise, and affecting
indifference.
"A tennis-player."
I shrugged my shoulders. "The man is known," I said.
"A Protestant?"
"It is not impossible."
"And a subject of the King, my master. A man," Don Antonio
continued, with increasing stiffness, "in fine, M. de Rosny, who,
after committing various offences, murdered his comrade in
prison, and, escaping in his clothes, took refuge in this
country."
I shrugged my shoulders again.
"I have no knowledge of that," I said coldly.
"No, or I am sure that you would not harbour the fellow," the
secretary answered. "Now that you do know it, however, I take it
for granted that you will dismiss him? If you held any but the
great place you do hold, M. de Rosny, it would be different; but
all the world see who follow you, and this man's presence stains
you, and is an offence to my master."
"Softly, softly, M. d'Evora," I said, with a little warmth. "You
go too fast. Let me tell you first, that, for my honour, I take
care of it myself; and, secondly, for your master, I do not allow
even my own to meddle with my household."
"But, my lord," he said pompously, "the King of Spain--"
"Is the King of Spain," I answered, cutting him short without
much ceremony. "But in the Arsenal of Paris, which, for the
present, is my house, I am king. And I brook no usurpers, M.
d'Evora."
He assented to that with a constrained smile.
"Then I can say no more," he answered. "I have warned you that
the man is a rogue. If you will still entertain him, I wash my
hands of it. But I fear the consequences, M. de Rosny, and,
frankly, it lessens my opinion of your sagacity."
Thereat I bowed in my turn, and after the exchange of some
civilities he took his leave. Considering his application after
he was gone, I confess that I found nothing surprising in it; and
had it come from a man whom I held in greater respect I might
have complied with it in an indirect fashion. But though it
might have led me under some circumstances to discard Diego,
naturally, since it confirmed his story in some points, and
proved besides that he was not a persona grata at the Spanish
Embassy, it did not lead me to value him less. And as within the
week he was so fortunate as to defeat La Varenne's champion in a
great match at the Louvre, and won also a match, at M. de
Montpensier's which put fifty crowns into my pocket, I thought
less and less of d'Evora's remonstrance; until the king's return
put it quite out of my head. The entanglement with Mademoiselle
d'Entragues, which was destined to be the most fatal of all
Henry's attachments, was then in the forming; and the king
plunged into every kind of amusement with fresh zest. The very
day after his return he matched his marker, a rogue, but an
excellent player, against my man; and laid me twenty crowns on
the event, the match to be played on the following Saturday after
a dinner which M. de Lude was giving in honour of the lady.
On the Thursday, however, who should come in to me, while I was
sitting alone after supper, but Maignan: who, closing the door
and dismissing the page who waited there, told me with a very
long face and an air of vast importance that he had discovered
something.
"Something?" I said, being inclined at the moment to be merry.
"What? A plot to reduce your perquisites, you rascal?"
"No, my lord," he answered stoutly. "But to tap your
excellency's secrets."
"Indeed," I said pleasantly, not believing a word of it. "And
who is to hang?"
"The Spaniard," he answered in a low voice.
That sobered me, by putting the matter in a new light; and I sat
a moment looking at him and reviewing Diego's story, which
assumed on the instant an aspect so uncommon and almost
incredible that I wondered how I had ever allowed it to pass.
But when I proceeded from this to the substance of Maignan's
charge I found an IMPASSE in this direction also, and I smiled.
"So it is Diego, is it?" I said. "You think that he is a spy?"
Maignan nodded.
"Then, tell me," I asked, "what opportunity has he of learning
more than all the world knows? He has not been in my apartments
since I engaged him. He has seen none of my papers. The
youngest footboy could tell all he has learned."
"True, my lord," Maignan answered slowly; "but--"
"Well?"
"I saw him this evening, talking with a Priest in the Rue Petits
Pois; and he calls himself a Protestant."
"Ah! You are sure that the man was a priest?"
"I know him."
"For whom?"
"One of the chaplains at the Spanish Embassy."
It was natural that after this I should take a more serious view
of the matter; and I did so. But my former difficulty still
remained, for, assuming this to be a cunning plot, and d'Evora's
application to me a ruse to throw me off my guard, I could not
see where their advantage lay; since the Spaniard's occupation
was not of a nature to give him the entry to my confidence or the
chance of ransacking my papers. I questioned Maignan further,
therefore, but without result. He had seen the two together in a
secret kind of way, viewing them himself from the window of a
house where he had an assignation. He had not been near enough
to hear what they said, but he was sure that no quarrel took
place between them, and equally certain that it was no chance
meeting that brought them together.
Infected by his assurance, I could still see no issue; and no
object in such an intrigue. And in the end I contented myself
with bidding him watch the Spaniard closely, and report to me the
following evening; adding that he might confide the matter to La
Trape, who was a supple fellow, and of the two the easier
companion.
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