The Cat and the King (5 page)

“We are glad to hear that you are taking an interest in spiritual matters, Monsieur de Saint-Simon,” the Maintenon greeted me as I entered. “We had thought of you as more terrestrially minded.”

“It is my desire to conform in all matters to the king's taste,” I replied with a bow. “And we know we follow that when we have the honor to be here.”

Madame de Maintenon glanced at me suspiciously, but then nodded, deciding to accept the compliment. She was certainly an attractive woman. She had clear pale skin, like marble, without a wrinkle, and large penetrating dark eyes. She was dressed, as usual, in black velvet, which wonderfully set off her pallor and dignity, with no ornaments but a large jeweled cross, which hung on a chain, a gift of the king. Her voice was soft and sweet but very firm, and she moved her arms and head gracefully but with determination. She was a bit too much the manager; it was even possible to imagine her as the keeper of some great inn, smiling, gracious, but with keys jangling at her waist and a mind that could embrace the change of linen as well as the reception of a monarch. I always wondered that the man who had tired of the infinite charm and variety of the Montespan could be satisfied with anyone as cool as her successor. But there was no accounting for tastes in love, particularly after a certain age.

There were some dozen persons in the room, mostly ladies, and Madame Guyon now proceeded to discourse for an hour on the doctrine of grace: who was possessed of it, who was not, who was saved, who damned. It was all a kind of half-baked, fashionable Jansenism. She was the most irritating kind of mystic: a woman whose downcast eyes, pursed lips and gentle tone expressed her merciful condescension towards the sinners with whom her hard lot had cast her. She was the perfect companion for the Maintenon, a proper acolyte in her smug little temple of hypocrisy. Even the awe created by the latter's presence could not restrain my argumentativeness. When the lecture was over and those of us who dared were permitted to question the oracle, I promptly did so.

“You imply, Madame, that it is already determined which of us are saved and which damned?”

“Yes, and irrevocably, sir,” came the sweet reply. “For if God knows everything, as he must, he knows the future.”

“Then he has no choice in the matter? Having once made up his mind, he cannot change it?”

“God does not have a mind, in our limited sense of the word. God is everything.”

“And would everything not include a mind?”

“It would include a mind and no mind. It would include a changeable mind and an unchangeable one.”

“I'm afraid that's a bit beyond me.”

Madame de Maintenon intervened. “Who are you to understand such mysteries, Monsieur de Saint-Simon?” Her tone was that of a governess to a child whose good conduct could not be relied on. “Very little is revealed to the wisest among us, let alone young men at court.”

“I am the humblest of the humble, Madame,” I replied respectfully. “I only seek illumination.”

“We have heard about your humility, sir. You want everyone to know your exact rung on the social ladder.”

“One can be humble and still know one's place on that ladder, Madame. One's exact place.” Was there the hint of a glare behind her sharp glance at me? Did she pick up a reference to her own equivocal position? At any rate, she said nothing. I turned again to the Guyon: “What I cannot comprehend is why, if we are already saved or damned, it does one any good to be good. Or even to pray.”

“How like a man to ask that!” Madame Guyon explained, directing a sad little smile towards the Maintenon. “As if we needed a reward for doing good or for praying! As if that were not the only way to true happiness! There can be no bliss comparable to communion with God. No true joy in this life save in the contemplation of the next!”

“But surely that cannot be if the next is hell fire,” I protested. “Or do you mean that God grants communion to those he has damned? That he offers a short respite of bliss to those who face an eternity of punishment?”

This brought our sovereign's morganatic spouse back into the discussion like a ship of the line preparing a broadside. “And if he
does,
sir, is it not evidence of his mercy? Or are you so addicted to the pleasures of this world that you have lost all sense of awe?”

At this point Savonne intervened desperately to protest that he would not be associated with my questions, and the topic was changed. I sat there, silent and fuming. It was really intolerable to contemplate what old Maintenon had got away with. It was not enough for her to have risen from a hovel in Martinique to the lap of the minor nobility, from being widow of a crippled, scatological poet to spouse of the king—oh, no! She had to have, in addition to the delights of contemplating heaven for herself, the delights of contemplating the rest of us in hell. And yet no thunderbolt was ever to strike the old bawd. She would die in peace in her bed at St. Cyr at the age of eighty-four.

An usher appeared in the doorway. It was the signal that the king had left the council chamber and was approaching. We all at once arose and took our leave. On the stairway to the terrace Savonne reproached me angrily.

“How could you be so impertinent? I can never take you there again.”

I paused to eye him coldly until Gabrielle, walking ahead, was out of earshot. “I should think there might be some shit that even you couldn't eat.”

Gabrielle, hearing Savonne's retorting exclamation, turned back to us.

“My dear,” she reproached me mildly, “I fear you went too far.”

“Tell him, Gabrielle, tell him! He thinks he knows everything!” And Savonne, with this parting shot, stomped off.

“But don't you think I had a point?” I demanded of Gabrielle.

“Oh, I know nothing about that. I was referring only to your irritating Madame de Maintenon.”

“What about God? Don't you think the Guyon may have irritated
him?
Deciding for him whom he damns and whom he doesn't?”

Gabrielle seemed to consider this for the first time. “I really don't know. I hadn't thought of it.”

Something in her tone made me curious. “Do you know something, Gabrielle? I've never heard you express an opinion on a religious matter. Is it possible that you don't...
believe?
”

She gazed calmly back at my now graver expression. “I suppose I believe in God. But he's still the god who runs the convent that Mother wanted to lock me up in.”

“But that's heresy!”

“Then let's keep it between you and me. I don't want to be burned.” She smiled, but her eyes did not. “
You
are my god,” she said in a sharper tone. “That's why I want you to be somebody!”

D
ECIDEDLY
, I was beginning to feel pushed by my wife. At times I resented this and would go through pouting days when I hardly spoke to her. But at others it would begin to seem to me that without the impetus that she provided I should have been destined to vegetate uselessly all my life at court.

If I was going to embrace a cause or a project, it might as well be a great one. If I were to be hanged, let it be for a sheep. I regarded the promotion of the bastards to their intermediate rank between the princes of the blood and the peers as the gravest existing threat to the established order under which we lived. I was convinced (with absolute justification, as it turned out) that the male bastards would ultimately be declared capable of succeeding to the crown. Very well. I should start there. What would be the king's next step? To marry Mademoiselle de Blois to his nephew? I would work to prevent it.

It was at this point that I needed a powerful ally, and who was more fit than my court hero, the prince de Conti? He was a prince of the blood, head of the house of Bourbon-Conti, a gallant warrior and a brilliant man, whom the king kept dangling idly in court because of the horrid contrast Conti had offered on the battlefield to the king's poltroon bastard, Maine. Furthermore, Conti was safe from a bastardly alliance, as he was already married to his cousin, one of the Condés and a sister of Monsieur le Due. He was also, be it admitted at once, the lover of Madame la Duchesse, but this fact played no part in my plans. One could be the lover of a bastard without approving of bastardy. And not only was he an expert in genealogies and questions of precedence; he was an ardent believer in the restoration of the rights and duties of the peers. Here was a prince who offered a gleam of hope in our benighted days!

Furthermore, he was not only my hero; he
looked
like a hero. He was, to put it simply, the most attractive man in the whole court, adored by men and women alike. He had very pale skin and black shiny ringleted hair, which he wore unpowdered. He was slight but muscular, and, though inclined to tenseness, moved with ease and agility. His eyes were large and dark and moist, and he spoke with a sweetness that made one at first suspect him of flattery. Yet why should he have stooped to flatter anyone? He simply loved people, and delighted to please them.

The reader should not gather from this that he was indiscriminate. On the contrary, he could be very keenly observant and would often make the most devastating remarks in the gentlest of tones. And he was fearless, too, quite undaunted by the rank or power of the person whom he might be criticizing. Of course, his station in life made it impossible for him to fight duels, but he had proved his courage over and over again on the battlefield, where he had exposed himself almost as recklessly as Savonne in cavalry charges. He seemed, indeed, to enjoy danger.

His popularity in the army had made him odious to the king, so Conti in the past year had been kept away from the military at court, where he had taken his revenge by carrying on his flagrant affair with Madame la Duchesse, to the unconcealed fury of their much less attractive spouses, who were, of course, brother and sister to each other.

Conti was always kind to younger people at court, and I used to call at his beautiful rooms in the south wing, which looked over the orangerie. He had a collection of Poussin's Roman landscapes and some remarkable Cellini figurines. One of these, a nude youth, seemed as perfectly made as himself. He liked to quiz me on questions of precedence, and he would gaze at me, while I answered, with that mild fixed stare of his. Sometimes I wondered if the velvet tone in which he made his comments was not mocking me. This was particularly so on the afternoon when I told him of the affair of the alms bag.

“It would be a comfort if we could look to you as our leader in these disputes,” I suggested.

“As your master of etiquette?”

“I hope you don't think I underestimate you!”

“No, no, my friend.” His fingers grazed my arm. “But for one who has dreamed of a generalship... well, surely you understand. In my brain I hear the roar of the cannon... and in my ears the chink of the alms bag.”

“But one goes with the other,” I protested. “I, too, have heard the cannon...”

“And without flinching. I saw you at Neerwinden.”

I flushed with pleasure. “Ah, sir, if you had your rights in the army, we should fear no enemy. I was saying to my friend Savonne only this morning: thank God for your marriage. You are safe from the bastards! The blood of the princesse de Conti is as pure as your own.

“Purer,” he retorted, with another of his smiles. “I don't forget that my mother was Mazarin's niece. I'm sure
you
don't.”

I returned his smile discreetly. Of course I didn't. “Many royal houses have been happy to marry into the families of cardinals,” I replied tactfully. “In Italy it has always been a badge of honor.”

“Well, at least Mazarin's nieces were legitimate. They were not like ‘papal nieces.' And basically I agree with you about our sovereign's bastards. I cannot but feel how we must look to the eyes of Europe when the ‘most Christian king' makes princes and princesses out of the issue of his adulteries.” Here, quite suddenly, he winked at me. “Charming as those princesses may be.”

“Let us concede that one of them at least is the most charming woman in France,” I said with a bow to acknowledge his liaison. “Excepting of course our spouses.”

“Excepting them, of course. But has it never occurred to you, my friend, that the whole business may be a scheme? Not just the elevation of the bastards, but all the games we play here at court?”

“Games?”

“Well, take this question of the alms bag. You think you're defending an important right of the dukes, do you not?”

“Only because it's a question of persistent encroachment. The particular issue must always seem trivial. But each bit of territory lost is lost forever.”

“Ah, but is there any territory really left? Isn't
that
the basic question? Isn't the fuss over the alms bag really designed to make
both
the Lorrainers and the dukes think they have something to fight over?”

I stared. “You mean the king
designed
it that way?”

He laughed. “Oh, I don't say he's that clever. It's simply the way the system works. It keeps us all here, chained up in this great gilded palace, like children playing with dolls.”

“You mean our cause is lost? Hopelessly lost? Is that what you're trying to tell me?”

“Let's put it that I merely face the possibility.”

“So there's no point in my offering the smallest resistance? Let the king satisfy his bastards with other peoples' honors?”

“They will find he is playing the same game with them that he has with others. He takes a privilege; he yields a bauble.”

“And what will be the end of it all?”

“An absolute monarch looming grimly through a cloud of butterflies. Lovely butterflies!” Conti laughed as he flicked the lace on his cuffs. “Or has it happened already?”

I was desperate. Images rushed through my mind. I thought of my father's wise, sad countenance. I remembered his story of how the saintly Louis XIII had rallied our forces against the Spanish invaders when even his iron cardinal had crumpled in panic. I saw our cavalry at Neerwinden. I saw the writhing, the dying. I turned now to face the mocking despair in Conti's eyes.