Though he was only in his forty-first year, Armand-Jeandu Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, was beginning to experience more and more that languid malaise of the body, those vague yet pungent pains of a chronically nervous and delicate constitution, those increasingly frightful headaches, which had, all his life, darkened occasions of the most intense joy and satisfaction in accomplishment.
There was many a time, when, remembering the tales of his mother about his sickly and precarious infanthood and childhood, he sincerely and gloomily wished that his physician had not been so skilful and so devoted, and had allowed him to sink, while still in a state of unconsciousness, into an early grave. And sometimes, meditating upon himself (a favorite occupation) he wondered if ambition did not always arise, like a strong and noxious flowering weed, from poisonous soil where gentler blossoms could find no roothold and no sustenance. Always, even deserts and wildernesses had their horrible blooms and plants, fatal and thorny, though never a violet and never a fragile rose. It seemed that the stronger vices and virtues, so ominous to men and nations, appeared only in stony or arid soil, in wild and dangerous places, or in deathly swamps, or in the crevices of mountains.
He had no illusions about himself, and of that disillusion had come his strength and his power. Only he knew the savage confusions and disorder of his own mind, from which came his passion for order in all things about him. The complexities of his devious spirit compelled a simplicity and implacable directness towards the world. The weakness of his frame and the instability of his constitution demanded a strength and inexorableness in policy and affairs. Hating hypocrisy in his heart, he employed it vigorously among men. Despising the ungrateful, he knew well the clever uses of ingratitude. Secretly, he detested exigent men, but knowing that exigency was a sceptre of power, he cultivated it. He had a terror of weakness and gentleness, feeling these soft spots in himself, and so he displayed a ruthlessness and mercilessness and cynicism which made him the most hated man in Europe and in France. He had a vast and unremitting love and desire for peace. Therefore, masochist as he was, he created about himself an atmosphere of miasmic intrigue, turbulence and strife. To be himself, he felt, was to die. In all his suffering, he had an almost monstrous love and zest for life. Life was power. Afraid of death, he could not get enough of power. But at all times his soul and his body suffered from an eternal weariness, sickness and despair. Only his will forced him to seek power; only his intellectual love for life kept at a distance the dissolution that constantly threatened his flesh.
He knew he was hated, and in his heart he acknowledged that he deserved this hatred. But the knowledge of the hatred amused him vastly. He knew that his enemies called him the Red Death, the Cardinal of the Huguenots, the Black Pox. He was even more amused at these names, for in him was a mortal detestation for all men. Sometimes he half believed that it was this loathing, this detestation, that kept him alive. Morbidly self-analytical, he experienced moments of cynical wonder that his strongest motivation was his ambition for the unity and strength of France. Then he knew that this motivation was a form of escape, and that when under its influence he had no time to think, and felt no pain.
Ambition, he knew, was the great illusion, rising most powerfully in those in whose body or mind the seeds of death were the most deeply planted. It was the convulsion of desperate limbs, fleeing. Yet no one knew better than he the ghastly weariness and distaste and longing for death that took up their abode like dark specters in the house of the ambitious.
But, always, he was amused. In a lesser man, amusement enervated the will to strike and the will to seize. In him, it was wine and stimulation. He knew that desire for life springs the most passionately in those who are dying; he knew that amusement is the most delightful in those who know there is nothing amusing in consciousness.
“The only enemies I have are the enemies of the State,” he was fond of saying. But he knew that his greatest enemy was himself. He loved to meditate upon himself, but indulged in this with increasing rarity, for when he so indulged, as in a secret and fatal vice, he was, for long days afterwards, so enervated, so exhausted, so prostrated and so benumbed, that he was only a ghost imitating the gestures and the sounds of the living. Yet never was he afflicted by so plebeian a thing as conscience, that haunter of the bourgeois soul, that puerile exercise of the feeble. Rather it was because he found in himself, in the moments of his vice, the futility and the horror, the illness and the despair, the soul-sickness, of all the universe, and perhaps of God.
Those who are genuinely enthusiastic and devoted are limited by their own passions. This, he knew. They were hampered by vehemences, by fervors, which rose from this enthusiasm. They were blinded by their own ecstasies. The man who attained real power was the intellectual man who had no enthusiasm, and so could operate only by will.
He surrounded himself with magnificence, as if to crush his secret love for austerity. His famous avarice was in reality the fevered terror of a man who builds barricades against an approaching enemy. Because he had no real desire for opulence and wealth, and knew that if he should allow these true characteristics to operate in his life he would be ruined and would perforce die, his hands were never satisfied in their grasping.
Sometimes, when experiencing the blackest moments of his immense disappointment in life, he indulged in a nostalgia for his early days at Pluvinal’s Academy, where he had learned military arts. Economics, he would think, have the gravest influence over a man’s life. It was the necessity for maintaining the endowment of Henry IV in his family that had made him a priest. In thinking of the military life he had abandoned at the request of his mother, and at the urging of the need for the continued endowment, he would be filled with pain and longing. He chose to forget, then, that he had abandoned the life of a soldier with promptness and without regret, seeing the larger possibilities of the priesthood. He forgot that a native conservatism and a shrewdness and immediacy had impelled his acquiescence. At these weaker times, he was sentimental, and liked to believe that in those early days he was a stern victim of circumstances. Later on, he would have moments of intense satisfaction that his decision had given him, in reality, a larger scope for his military accomplishments. His passion for militarism and his knowledge of strategy, his love for discipline, enforced order in his wild and disorderly mind and thus prolonged his life. Fearing death, therefore, he constantly cultivated his bent for militarism.
In short, he cultivated all those things which might tend to keep him alive. Sometimes he became aware of his manœuvres, and tasted the dryness of death in his mouth. He would allow these moments to come rarely. However, his tormented soul, tormented almost from birth with a desire for extinction, revenged itself upon his body.
Sometimes he would think: I support tyrants because I despair of the people. But in the ruthlessness and inhumanity of tyrants he found strength for himself. A tenderness and compassion for the people would hasten his mortal disintegration. Compassion, he would meditate, is good, but it must not be indulged in promiscuously by those who desire to rule. (Or to live, would whisper his soul in reply.) And so, from one man’s terror rose his detestable reputation for indifference to suffering, to injustice, to cruelty and to mercy. He was a man beset by death.
His fear had given his natural reserve a basilisk quality, his natural quietness of temperament an inscrutability, his native languor a specious tolerance, his French lucidity a contempt for abstract justice, his immense curiosity a genius for intrigue, his inherent firmness an indomitable immutability. There was a coldness of the quality of his temperament, and this had degenerated into an icy ferocity. His natural egotism had extended itself to an inordinate pride of family, in which even his sardonic self-analysis could find nothing ridiculous. Even his humor, with which he had been richly endowed at birth, had become a vicious irony and an obscene subtlety. His tendency to melancholy had become a constant black despair which had entered his very bones. Even his intellect had turned demoniacal.
It was rumored that there was a taint in his blood, which in some members of his family had become imbecility or madness. At all events, he was given, mostly in privacy, to moods of epileptic exaltation and causeless ecstasy, which left him ominously weakened in body while it enhanced the exaggerated vices and virtues of his temperament, and his fear.
In externals, only, was there safety for him. His genius for organization came from his inability to organize the thoughts that beset and besieged his rampant soul. He was keen and rapid in all things, because of the somber despair that lived always with him, threatening to destroy him at the last.
Once he said: “A passion for justice can so distract a man, can so confuse him, that he may become no more than a rag flapping in a dozen diverse winds. It imperils the strength of the State, is a force for disunity.” But in reality he meant that it was himself that might become a rag in the wind.
Always, he was terrified that he might discover that the mountain on which he had built his house was only a mole-hill, and the god he worshiped dwelt not in a far and momentous heaven, but in the habitations of earth-worms. From his earliest youth he had suffered from fits of inarticulate and gloomy depression. Now, as he was growing older, he suffered more and more that terrible paralysis of the spirit, that frightful absence of all emotional sensation, that suspension of the will like the suspension of the heart-beat. It was then, in stern terror, that he would rise from his bed and plunge into public and foreign affairs with an inhuman concentration and sleepless and ruthless ambition, and an extraordinary and supernatural intuition, all the stronger because behind them was nothing but the will to live.
His one unsleeping horror was that he might one day lose this will to live. Out of this frenzy came his devastating ambition for France, his dedication to the dream of bringing about her internal unity, his determination to confer power and splendor upon her, of vitalizing her and rendering her immune to disintegration and decay and ruin. She-became, for him, a symbol of himself, of his own will to live, of his own indomitability. His soul believed that in the existence and strength and triumph of France was his own continued existence and strength and triumph. France must live, lest he die.
Death lived in his soul. This gave a kind of unearthly phosphorescence to his flesh, as if he were already dead. His mind operated through and over his dying and tortured body, with a grim and desperate defiance, shining incandescently through his large unfathomable eyes, which, at rare moments, were heavy and dim with melancholy. There was a fixity about them, like a cat’s unwinking gaze, and their glance had a slowness of movement which intimidated, set as they were under commanding and extraordinary brows. They dominated his countenance, threw into insignificance his delicate slight face and extreme ascetic pallor, his arched, finely cut nose, the tight fragile lips between the soldierly mustaches and the pointed small beard. About that mouth were the graven lines of suffering and self-discipline, and between the eyes were the taut furrows which resulted from intense thought and frightful headaches. There was about him an inhuman assurance and steadfast quietness which gave him the air of a man who suffered in silence. But this was not so. From himself came the stories of his headaches, and his complaints of them. In spite of his adult and lofty irony, his secret ridicule of superstition, his slightly smiling disgust of the simple folk who employed incantations and magic, he so descended, in the extremity of his pain, as to offer a Novena of Masses if public prayers would be instrumental in relieving his agony. He even devoted himself to Our Lady of Ardilles in those blind moments of fervor employed by the wisest and most disillusioned men when confronted by inexorable nature and calamity. Like the aristocratic Petronius, who believed nothing and sacrificed to the gods on the premise that it did no harm and might mystically do some good, he frequently implored the people to pray for him. Later, he had moments of amused and embarrassed shame, but these he did not betray even to his familiars.
He was a natural actor. His own artistry and love for drama made him sedulously study those aspects and attitudes needed to impress his people, those lovers of air and grace and rich color. He cultivated a presence, which his inherent dignity enhanced, though he was slender rather than tall. He radiated dominion, partly assumed, partly natural. He walked slowly and majestically, his thin dark hair clinging to the shape of his delicate skull, his red robes falling heavily about him in exquisite folds, as though he employed a toga-folder in the manner of the ancient Roman patricians. He had a secret admiration for the fineness and whiteness of his narrow hands, and even in the moments of deepest thought, and in audiences, had a mannerism of stroking them and holding them high to drain the discoloring blood from them and give them delicacy. Nothing in his slow and languid movements, his meditative manner, his quiet but resonant voice, gave a hint of the febrile vigor and passion of his mind. He was, even to himself, a character in a stately opera, neutral and silent and reserved, yet in these very things the more frightful and impelling, like an unbroken and violent storm approaching across serene heavens, always threatening to break into devastation and death while still silent and pent. This aspect of potential violence and disaster unnerved both friend and foe alike, and was partly the secret of his power.
Like all those great and terrible men who subdue and rule other men, he had a quality of mountebankery. But unlike his peers, he was not self-convinced by his own mountebankery, nor was he hypnotized by it into the belief that it was natural to him and not mountebankery at all. Never, save in rare instances, did he deceive himself. Strangely, this made him only the more powerful, and gave him flexibility, for he knew that mountebankery was a prime necessity of those who wish to impress and rule the masses, and even the intelligent. But he was never indelicate, never gross. This came partly from his real fastidiousness, and partly from his knowledge that the best of mountebanks cultivate elegance. So he cultivated this elegance, which was native to him, for he loathed the people and was nauseated by their sweat and their smells. He served two purposes, thus: he retained his own fastidiousness, and impressed the people.
Even his enemies admitted that Richelieu seemed inspired by but one ardor, one passion: the unity of France. Even his most hating foes acknowledged that he loved his country, that his most violent and ruthless machinations stemmed from his resolve to bring glory and strength upon her.
But Richelieu knew secretly that nationalism is the pretense of a man who finds some men who are not hateful—his own. Nationalism invariably springs from a hatred of all people; but egotism demands that one’s own be at least thought tolerable. Richelieu, still not deceiving himself, knew that nationalism is the necessary illusion of the soldier, but a philosopher who espouses it has lost his logic, a statesman, his perspective, an artist, his creative sympathy, a wise man, his humor, a priest, his God. In serving France, Richelieu at least suspended his logic, his perspective, his sympathy, his humor, and, inevitably, his God. A man who did not suspend these was afflicted by hesitation and doubt, and so was lost.
When he was alone, as he was this beautiful morning in early summer, he was assaulted, beset and besieged, by himself, by his terror of death, by his illness, despair and melancholy. Believing that a man must first fight himself, he often forced himself to be alone, where he wrestled with that dual spirit of his as Jacob wrestled with the angel. But he himself was a dark angel, and not an angel of light. In these self-flagellations was the instinct of a masochist who despised himself.
Rigorously, in the morning, he officiated at Mass, or attended it. But afterwards, he retired to his chamber, to sink into bed in a veritable swoon of exhaustion. It was always well past noon before he rose again. About an hour before noon, he would arouse himself, and lie in his bed, feeling that he had just emerged from the tomb. He would lie supine, motionless, staring before him, his eyes idly following a ray of sunshine, a dust mote, a shadow. But behind that immobile countenance, his army of besieging thoughts would march and countermarch, however he might try to restrain and discipline them. Now he was vulnerable; now he had no defense. Nor, secretly, did he desire it.
His chamber was great and lofty, and very silent, though beyond the massive doors those called for the day’s interviews waited in impatient masses. The white plaster ceiling, at which he frequently stared blindly, was carved chastely. The panelled walls glowed richly in the sun which poured through the tall windows, the polished glass of which was set in tiny leaded panes. His scarlet curtained bed, whose crimson velvet canopy, golden-fringed, extended almost to the ceiling, faced the window, and was covered by red silken coverlets embroidered with the arms of his family, and with an immense golden cross. To his right was the great carved fireplace, in which, even in the summer, burned a dull crimson fire, for Richelieu was eternally shaken by strong or feebler chills. The wall above the fireplace was carved intricately, and at the right was a tall gilt chair, covered by crimson velvet, in which he often sat during his midnight meditations. On the other side of the fireplace, near the wall in which the windows were set, was a carved chest of black wood, on which stood three golden bowls. A long black wooden table stood before the window, covered with some rare objets d’art, which he loved, collected and cherished. From his bed he could pick out the touches of red, blue, yellow and green which flecked them.
As he lay shivering in his bed, his slight body hardly lifting the silken crimson coverlets, he could hear, subdued, the murmuring and footsteps of passing throngs below. But these sounds only enhanced the breathless quiet of his room. He stared before him, and saw nothing but his life, and all he had done, and the things he must do. He could not decide which wearied him more: the past, or the future. His weariness was like a heavy stone on his body, crushing it.
The sockets of his extraordinary eyes burned dryly, aching with sleeplessness. He closed his lids; the light that poured through the windows lay on those lids and created dim red shadows before his shuttered vision. Though he did not drowse, dim tortured fragments floated before his eyes, like those which one perceives when falling asleep—a hand, an eye, a pale shadow of an unknown face, bloodless lips open upon a silent cry.
Suddenly, without any warning, without any premonition, the face of Anne of Austria, the Queen of France, rose up before his clouded vision, not faintly, not bloodless, but in its full young beauty and bewitching loveliness. A flood of intolerable heat pervaded his body, and he twitched violently, as a man afflicted with epilepsy twitches. “The vile Spaniard!” he murmured, involuntarily. But the heat of his body increased to a devastating fever. He saw those green large eyes under golden brows and lashes, the rose and pearl of those soft young cheeks, the arch of soft chestnut hair rising over the snowy forehead, the living moistness of that parted full red mouth with its Habsburg under-lip, pouting and protruding. He saw the slope of those famous white shoulders, and the curve of those beautiful arms, like marble come to life.
He writhed on his bed, overcome by agony. In his middle was a pit of aching emptiness and wild yearning. All the women he had known became only anonymous shadows, their wine emptied, the vessels of their bodies broken and forgotten. But this woman whom he had never known, whom his hand had never caressed, was like a disease in his flesh. Those emerald eyes had looked upon him only with fear, hatred and loathing. Even when his fingers had touched her own, he had felt their shrinking, and he had seen the averting of her gaze as if she had glanced at corruption. At the exact moment when his lips might touch her hand, she had withdrawn it with an almost imperceptible shudder. She had concealed her hatred under a calm and indifferent manner, but it had blazed in her eyes, trembled like the light of a sword on her parted lips. Though she was young, she had the imperious hauteur of the Habsburgs, the remote pride. But she had not been able to conceal her emotions at the sight of the Cardinal.
“I might be your friend,” he had whispered once to her. But she had regarded him then with impassive coldness and immobile hatred. He had not added: “Or, I might be your most deadly enemy.”
He had become her deadly enemy. There was nothing too mean, too base, for him to do to bring wretchedness and misery to this Habsburg princess. In tormenting her, there was surcease for his own pain. He had besmirched her in the eyes of her husband, that cold and capricious and violent man. He had poisoned the mind of her mother-in-law against her, that dull and repulsive woman, Marie de Medici. He had intrigued against her, in great things and in petty. He brought hell and purgatory to her life, sad enough as it was in that city of strangers and enemies. When he found nothing, he invented. It was a mystery, even to his familiars, how such a man, such a statesman and soldier, such a politician and prince of the Church, could gather all the forces of his nature, his genius, his intelligence and his subtlety, to annoy, frustrate, embitter and torture one defenseless young woman, hardly more than a girl. It was as if Lucifer himself might stoop to torment a poor frail little butterfly, or withdraw himself from the seduction of a world, from a frightful assault on heaven, to pluck apart a rose.
He set his spies about her, to report her slightest word to him, to watch her every movement. He had set a whisper about Paris about her debaucheries, which existed only in his imagination. She, in turn, quivering, fragile and helpless, watched him spin his black web about her. She struggled; had, in her own pay, spies of her own, but they were poor creatures compared with the diabolical cleverness of his. She felt the meshes of his lies about her, and could do nothing. She had no friends. She had learned the bitterest lesson of the defenseless: that every man’s hand is against the helpless, every man’s voice against the persecuted, every man’s violence against the innocent. No wonder, then, that she drank gall in every cup, and ate poisoned bread.
Then came his most venomous opportunity.
He had attained a precarious peace with England. Charles the First had sent as his ambassador to France, the illustrious and handsome George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He became a great favorite at the French Court, for he was gay and subtle, ingenious and brilliant, charming and witty. From the first, it was evident that he pitied the beautiful young queen, moving in her pale isolation and misery among her remorseless enemies. From that pity had sprung his love. He was the more inclined to fix his attention upon her when he saw the dreadful enmity of Richelieu. At first, he had been amused, had said to himself: “The minions of that black and monstrous hierarchy find none too helpless, too obscure, too young or soft, for their vicious and fiendish attentions.” But later, he saw that there was a personal element in all this, and he discovered the lust and passion of the Cardinal.
George Villiers found all men amusing, but it was an amusement without rancor, for he was, at heart, a young man much in love with life. He particularly found the Cardinal’s mature passion amusing, though later he was impressed by its satanic violence and power. It had the grotes-querie of a giant’s obsession for a delicate fairy. Still later, the young Duke began to frown uneasily.
He was, first of all, an Englishman. The peace between England and France, brought about by the subtlety of Richelieu who wished no ally for the German Protestants, was as tenuously balanced as a sword upon a pen-point. A breath would disturb it. Buckingham wished no breath to stir the thunderous air. So, when Richelieu began his whispers in Paris about an alleged and unclean love-affair between the Queen and the young Duke, Buckingham was inordinately dismayed. He returned to London with a precipitateness which cast no aspersion on his personal bravery, but was solely occasioned by alarm lest the peace be destroyed between the two peoples. The storm must inevitably break, but British caution, as always, advised that the breaking be postponed as long as possible. In that caution was the English maxim that all men, given enough time, must die. A postponed war might often become an indefinitely postponed war.
But the absence of Buckingham did nothing to abate the whispers. The Queen was snickeringly accused of corresponding with her lover, of meeting him in secret rendezvous on French soil.
And now, the incredible was occurring in the mind and soul of that strange and terrible man, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu. His hatred and venom against Buckingham aroused his sleeping animosity and loathing for all that was English. His caution was dissolved like a strand of silk in a fire. There is nothing like a war to unify a people, he said, with increasing frequency. Historian though he was, he refused to remember that wars destroy the victor as well as the vanquished. Madness had seized his mind.
He thought of all these things as he lay in his bed this summer morning. He allowed the destructive and drowning tide of his thoughts to inundate him. He remembered everything, and everything was colored by his fever, his passion, his frustration and despair.
And as he thought, his disgust for all men rose up in him like malignant black bile, and disgust for himself. In his own dishonor, he felt the dishonor of all other men; in his sickness for himself, was a sickness for the whole world. He felt in himself all the malevolence, all the viciousness, stupidity, shame, degradation, cruelty, obtuseness, bestiality and meanness of all his fellow creatures. There is not a beast, he thought, with that brutal clarity in which he regarded himself, that would not be ashamed of claiming kinship with us.
He remembered his youth, his single-heartedness, his soldier’s simplicity, his steadfast eyes and indomitable faith. He was incredulous, remembering. He looked at the far outline and faint lineaments of a stranger. And was wearily amused. But even in those days he had been instinctively disingenuous, otherwise he would never have abandoned his military career for the gown. He remembered a conversation he had had in those days with a devoted Jesuit, a friend of his father’s. The Jesuit had maintained that the Church had solely for its object the spread of Christendom, and that all methods must serve that end, that the Church must oppose all those who first thought of temporal things, whether gownsman or soldier or king. The Jesuit, who had been a singularly simple and noble man for one belonging to a sinister and dangerous order, had considered that the Church must serve the welfare of men, and bring them into the fold with gentleness and mercy and saintliness, despising the means of power, and always opposing tyrants and oppressors.
But Richelieu, on the eve of renouncing his military career, had said:
“To survive, and grow stronger, the Church must always serve the powerful, ride in their train. To espouse the cause of the suffering and the oppressed is the first step to oblivion, to hunger, death and impotence. No sensible man, then, no hierarchy of vast aim and ambition, can afford a promiscuous Christianity or sentimental humanitarianism.”
From the first, then, he had seen the Church, not as the server of God and the protector of the helpless, but as a world-organization bent on temporal power and mighty princes. He saw it, too, as the servant of himself, and France. Remembering the lonely, sweet-faced Jesuit, he smiled contemptuously. That man had been a crier in the wilderness, despised by his colleagues who were blood-brothers of Armand-Jean du Plessis, prince of the Church of Rome.
It served him well, that Church who was the inheritor of all the taboos and superstitions and paganisms of the centuries, and whose Christianity was the fog behind which it inexorably and fatally carried on its plottings against the enlightenment and freedom of men, against the souls of men. He used it, cleverly, and with enormous wisdom.
Yet, it sickened him. From some obscure ancestor he had inherited that deadly gift of never being able to deceive himself. The Church sickened him; it made him sick of his own soul.
By what falsehood, hypocrisy, cunning, craft, cruelty and indifference had he raised himself to be literally the King of France, master of Europe! By what shamefulness and degradation had he exalted himself! He thought of the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, who was a symbol to him of the debauchery of his own soul. That big gross woman, whose touch had been pollution, who had lain on his breast in fetid midnight hours! He felt corruption, prostitution, through all his flesh. Yet, strangely, it was the memory of himself sitting on a cushion at her feet, ogling her with amorous languor as he strummed the lute he had learned to please her, which revolted him the most. In that act was the summing up of his debauchery and his prostitution. The lute-strumming had been more shameful than the mere polluting of his body in his implacable search for power.
He was only forty-one years old, half-dead, obscenely stained and dishonored. He had attained the power to which he had dedicated himself. He lay today on his bed and looked at it, and his nausea of spirit communicated itself to his body.
He stopped at nothing. He plotted like a serpent in a jungle. He was sleepless. The spring of his lust and greed had been wound too tightly in him to be stopped. He dared not stop, lest he die. He betrayed wantonly, that he might live.
He encouraged the Protestant great nobles for the sake of the unity of France, and, secretly, the advance of his own power. But he also derived a bitter amusement in that encouragement.
As he lay thinking, he heard the great door open softly. He lifted his heavy lids, and his strange tigerish eyes fixed themselves upon the young priest entering.
“Ah, Louis,” he murmured. He lifted himself slightly on his cushions and smiled. He loved Louis for the amusement he invariably offered him. He lifted his slender white hand in a languid blessing. Louis bowed silently. The Cardinal watched his secretary as the young man, with his stately step, approached the carved and gilded chair at the bedside, and sat down with his usual majestic grace.
The Cardinal surveyed him intently. With quickened interest, he perceived that Louis de Richepin was paler than usual, his countenance more rigid, more marblelike, and that there were purple stains under the large blue eyes. But directness was not one of the Cardinal’s less subtle characteristics in dealing with individuals, and he held his peace. He would soon be able, by devious means, to ascertain the cause of the visible distress of the priest.
His manner toward Louis was both fond and ironical, and sometimes lightly teasing.
“The rabble outside is as thick as ever, eh?” he asked.
“There is a large audience waiting to consult your Eminence,” replied Louis, stiffly.
“Ah, yes,” murmured the Cardinal, smiling slightly. “Fetch me those papers upon the table, Louis, if you please.”
Louis rose, his black garments rustling. He moved across the carpet and the polished floor like a noble ghost. He brought the papers to his master, and laid them on the crimson coverlet. He seated himself again. His silence had the quality of white stone.
The Cardinal, in a languid but firm voice, began to dictate messages to his secretary. He used Latin almost exclusively; he had a remarkably eloquent and smooth genius for that language. Louis wrote the dictation rapidly. The shadows of the golden sun became longer in the lofty chamber. The hum behind the doors increased in tempo. As he dictated, the Cardinal’s eyes remained fixed on Louis’ face, and the strange changing lights in them sharpened, grew more vivid. His heart beat with an anticipatory pleasure under his white silken nightshirt. Once or twice, he shivered involuntarily, for he was always cold, even in his warm bed.
There was a sudden pause. Louis waited, his head bent, his lips stern and cold.
“Yes,” murmured the Cardinal, abstractedly. “Louis,” he continued, “please request your brother, Monsieur de Richepin du Vaubon, to attend me tomorrow morning at this hour. He has returned, I hear, from some escapade?” He smiled. “Young blood,” he murmured.
Louis started violently. He lifted his head, and across his pale and beautiful countenance a dim flush raced like a fever. Fear, stark and vivid, began to glitter in his eyes.
“Arsène,” he faltered. His hands clenched on his knee.
“Yes, Arsène.” The Cardinal’s smile was friendly. “I enjoy his conversation. He has wit and charm, and is devilishly clever. Too, I wish to consult him about a certain matter.” He paused, then added negligently: “He is a close friend of Paul de Vitry, is he not?”
Louis cried out: “That is true, but he is no plotter with de Vitry! I can assure your Eminence of that—”
The Cardinal raised his deep brows. “Did I allege he was? But perhaps he can give me some information which might be useful.”
“We are not traitors, in our family,” Louis said, out of his fear and agitation.
“Did I say so? But Arsène was never reconciled to the faith of his fathers, was he?” The Cardinal was enjoying the fright of his secretary. “But I suspect Arsène of nothing, except frivolity. I have always had a fondness for him. It is my intention to offer him the captaincy of my Guards, even though he is still a Huguenot, from what I have learned.”
“It is a great honor,” said Louis, in a stifled voice. “But, as your Eminence has so rightly said, he is frivolous and careless.” He recalled the Cardinal’s words, and a wild envy and hatred filled him, now that his fear had diminished. “Discipline is beyond him. He plays like a child, though he is no longer very young. He detests responsibility. Though my father is of delicate constitution, Arsène can hardly be induced to visit our estates and supervise them. He is careless and abandoned and immature. Your Eminence’s offer will not impress him, I must confess. It will be a waste of your Eminence’s time.”
“Nevertheless, I intend to make him the offer.”
The Cardinal, who knew the hatred Louis bore his brother, was delighted and stimulated at the sight of the young priest’s visible jealousy and detestation.
He said: “I think you disparage Arsène too much, Louis. Because he has a lighter spirit than yours, and is concerned with amorous intrigues and swordplay, does not argue that he is worthless. I find him amusing. He is intrepid and fearless, and has a way with men. He is liked indiscriminately. He would make an excellent captain. M. de Cavois is becoming too stiff and rigid; he is no longer young, and I have a wish to retire him, for he antagonizes the Musketeers. He lacks the quality of adventure, and thinks only of discipline. Arsène would be a prime favorite with the men.”
Louis was silent. He was affrighted. His imagination rioted. It was very possible that Arsène would accept, in order to be privy to the Cardinal’s secrets, the better to betray him. Duty struggled with Louis’ love for his father. To enlighten the Cardinal would be to betray Arsène, and through Arsène, his father. The flush on Louis’ cheek deepened; dampness appeared on his marble forehead. His hands shook.
Then, in a dwindled voice, he said: “I must beg your Eminence to reconsider. I know my brother too well.”
The Cardinal shrugged. “Arsène has not yet accepted,” he replied, indifferently. “Shall we proceed with our correspondence?”
Half-fainting though he was with his agitation and terror, Louis could yet control himself, and attend to his duties.
There was no hesitation at any time in the Cardinal’s smooth and quiet voice as it flowed between his frail, hardly moving lips. As he spoke, he drew his imperial thoughtfully through his white fingers. His melancholy eyes, opaque with reflection and concentration now, regarded Louis without seeing him. Power was in his voice, courteous but filled with potential violence, uncompromising and urbane. Once or twice he smiled to himself, reflectively.
He dictated a letter to the King, and now his hidden smile grew deeper.
“It is with the most intolerable regret, Sire, that your servant has been unable to attend the gaming tables as usual during the past week. I must crave your indulgence for my illness, which has afflicted my body with heavy rheumatic pains. Only the most disabling and painful agony could keep me from your Majesty’s side, as you well know. But during this period my mind has not been inactive, and though I have apparently neglected your letter received two days ago, it is because I wished to give further study to the matter and clarify my thoughts.”
He paused. Louis, writing swiftly, felt some grim excitement. He waited, his pen clenched between his fingers.
“I must beg your Majesty to reflect on the enormous difficulties inherent in any move against the great Protestant nobles and La Rochelle at this time. France is still divided, still weakened by war, still seething with tumult and disorder. One must move carefully in this regard, as you, Sire, with your enormous wisdom, are well aware. I remember, with humility, all your previous counsels in the matter.”
He paused again. He raised himself on his pillows, smiling broadly, his eyes twinkling with enjoyment and malice.
“There are some, as your Majesty is aware, who would like nothing better than to see France torn asunder with religious dissension. I need not name their names, for fear of touching upon a most delicate situation in your Majesty’s own house-hold. As you so well know, Sire, I have at all times endeavored to reconcile your Majesty with those closest to you, believing that domestic bliss should not be denied kings. For my efforts I have received only disdain, calumny and hatred, as your Majesty can attest. Nevertheless, as a devoted servant of your Majesty, I shall never desist in my efforts to bring peace to your heart and happiness to your hearth.”
The Cardinal’s imperial had been pulled to a soft thin string. He caressed it absently. His tigerish eyes gleamed. Louis did not look up, but there were blue lines about his lips, and his hand trembled visibly.
“Nevertheless, craving your Majesty’s indulgence before-hand, I must, out of my devotion to you, be frank, however angered you might be after the perusal of this letter.
“Though your Majesty’s most Catholic brother, Philip of Spain, is bound to you by the closest of ties through his sister, her Majesty, your Queen and mine, candor impels me to speak plainly. Investigation has proved to me without doubt, though with terrible anguish of mind, that Spain has been secretly negotiating with England for an alliance against France. Philip, in his hatred for France, is impelled to ally himself with our most formidable and heretical enemy. In refusing to be drawn into any premature conflict at this time, I humbly believe that we can restore tranquillity and strength to France, rendering her strong and invulnerable, better able to withstand battle abroad and confusion within. Let our enemies then beware!”
Louis’ pen fell from his fingers. He lifted his head and gazed at the Cardinal with suppressed rage and disappointment. The Cardinal, perceiving this, was titillated. He arched his steep brows.
“Well, Louis,” he said, indulgently. “Speak, or you will burst with spleen.”
Louis stood up in his agitation, grasping the papers on which he had been writing.
“Your Eminence,” he began, in a choked voice, “is, as always, very kind, very indulgent, to permit me to speak. You have never silenced me, claiming that I sometimes have flashes of wisdom. I crave your pardon in advance, but, as you are willing, I must say what I must say.”
Crimson had flooded the white stone of his countenance; his blue eyes were passionate with anger and detestation. The Cardinal inclined his head, and smiling, waited.
“Her Majesty,” continued Louis, pressing the palms of his hands rigidly together, “has frequently urged that we destroy that bastion of hellish heretics, La Rochelle, with immediate dispatch. So long as this bastion remains, a State within a State, we are undone, at the mercy of Spain and England, of the German Empire. It is the Achilles heel of our domestic and foreign policy, the unguarded breach in the wall through which our enemies can enter. Destroy La Rochelle, Monseigneur, and the English will have no port of entry into the heart of France. As it is now, the English can send supplies to the Huguenots at La Rochelle, encourage them in their obstinacy and treason, fortify them with ships and German, Spanish and Italian malcontents, who love their Church less than they hate France.”
He was forced to halt, his large pale features twisting with malignant passion. The Cardinal advanced his head slightly towards him, the better to observe these manifestations which could spring less from abstract indignation than personal hatred.
Louis continued, his voice trembling: “So long as the Edict of Nantes is in force, and La Rochelle unmolested in her effrontery and impudence, we are weakened, we are defenseless, we are open to attack by our hating enemies. I implore your Eminence to reflect upon this!”
“I have reflected,” murmured the Cardinal. He passed his hand over his face in one of those sudden and frequent attacks of exhaustion which so afflicted him. “You are rash, Louis. You would spring into battle against the Rochellais without sufficient preparation. You would revoke the Edict of Nantes without meditating upon the strong possibility of devastating disunity in France. However brave the heart, bare hands are not sufficient to stop swords or deflect cannon balls. Every peaceful moment gained is an hour of strength and preparation for France. But do not consider even for an instant that I do not have my plans!”
He fixed his eyes upon Louis. “It is probably only a calumny, a libel, but I have heard rumors that your brother, Arsène, has many friends in La Rochelle, and that he visits them upon occasion.”
Louis said nothing. He paled excessively. He sat down, abruptly. The Cardinal, smiling, indicated by an inclination of his head that the correspondence must proceed. Louis’ fingers felt numb as they held the pen. Then suddenly he cried out in a strange voice, shaking with vehemence: “Your Eminence must destroy the serpent within the heart of France, the Huguenots, the plotters, the heretics! How shall we endure with this venom unchecked in our souls?”
The Cardinal, as if Louis had not spoken at all, continued his dictation, in the smoothest of tones:
“In your letter, your Majesty impatiently quotes the late lamented de Luynes, who had conceived the premature and short-sighted policy of re-establishing our Holy Faith in Béarn, and destroying the Calvinists there established. With sorrow, I must recall to you the events of Montauban, where de Luynes was so ignominiously defeated, and who died of a broken heart in consequence. The militancy of our faithful children is to be admired. But it cannot but be deplored after a study of the facts. We are not yet ready for a move against internal and external enemies.
“However,” he resumed, in a firmer voice, “I promise, as always, to devote all my energy, and all the authority that it may please you to place in my hands, to destroying the Huguenots, abasing the pride of the great nobles, restoring all your subjects to their duty and in raising the name of your Majesty among foreign nations to its rightful place. I ask only faith in my prudence and in my devotion.”
He paused, then said: “Louis, I must ask you to take that to his Majesty, in person. I can trust no other.”
Louis bit his lip gloomily. His chest heaved under his black robes. He inclined his head. The Cardinal lay back against his cushions and regarded his secretary with malicious pleasure.
“Speak, Louis,” he said, in fond tones.
Louis drew a deep breath, clasped his hands together. “Your Eminence speaks of national unity. Is not the unity of Christendom more important? It appears to me that this unity of Christendom, perforce, will automatically bring with it national unity.” He continued: “The toleration of a State within a State can bring only ruin.”
The Cardinal smiled mockingly, but his voice was gentle, if ironical: “If we are to subdue the Huguenots, return France to complete Catholic unity, we should do so by example, virtue, prayer and humility. Do you doubt the efficacy of prayer, Louis? Pray then!”
Louis grew paler than ever. He regarded the Cardinal with stark simplicity, yet with it was a white indignation.
“We must first prove to God that we are sincere in our determination that He shall not be blasphemed by heretics.”
The Cardinal was silent a moment, then he said negligently: “Ah, you fanatics! I have the conviction, Louis, that you would enjoy the reintroduction of the wheel, the gallows and the ax against the Huguenots. Essentially, the fanatic is uncivilized. And do we not boast that we are the most civilized of people, in comparison with the coarse English, the boorish Germans, the vicious Spaniards?”
“Civilized uses cannot be considered in dealing with heretics!” cried Louis, and again that convulsion passed over his face as from some secret spasm.
“The Holy Office missed a fine recruit by some centuries,” observed the Cardinal, shaking his head. He thought to him-self, with pleasure: How his brother torments him, afflicts his soul! He regarded Louis with his long and melancholy gaze.
“My dear Louis, I am not your confessor, but I have thought that this morning you have been distrait. I hope that you consider me your friend, and allow me to assist you if you be in need of assistance.”
Louis started perceptibly, and half rose from his chair. Then he was motionless. So uncomplex, so simple, was his essential nature, that he could find no duplicity in the Cardinal’s words. Louis had not learned that Richelieu wasted no speech, and that every word was said with a purpose, if only a malicious one.
He put his hand to his eyes for a moment, and was silent.
Certain, now, that he had not been mistaken, the Cardinal forgot his malaise and stared at the young priest with increasing curiosity.
“Mon cher,” he murmured, “it is evident that you are distressed. Again, I urge you to consider that I am your friend.”
Louis began to speak in a pent, low voice: “I have never found it difficult to read my whole soul. Now, I find it impossible.”
“You mean,” said Richelieu gently, “that you dare not read your soul.” He was faintly excited. What could have stirred that blue-white glacier? The Cardinal knew that the movements of glaciers are never insignificant, that they bear in them the potentialities of death and enormous destruction, that their motion is irresistible and devastating. He sat up, and stared at Louis with avid interest.
“It may be true, what you say, Monseigneur,” whispered Louis. He dropped his hand and looked at the Cardinal with complete anguish. “It may be I dare not delve too deeply in myself.” He halted, and over him swept the avalanche of his emotions, confused, chaotic, and desperate. The pale smoothness of his countenance flushed feverishly.
“It began, this morning, with the book I borrowed from your Eminence.”
“Ah,” said the Cardinal, smoothing his imperial between his fingers with a sensuous slowness.
“I found a passage in that book which echoed the more undisciplined thoughts which sometimes assail me. I have told you, Monseigneur, of these thoughts, in the past. For some time I have believed that I had conquered them, driven them out of my mind like demons. When I read that book this morning, they returned like dark and conquering armies.”
“So!” exclaimed the Cardinal, more and more delighted. His strange eyes glowed with a molten light, and he leaned on his elbow towards Louis.
The young man clenched his hands together, and blue lines appeared deeply beside his pale lips.
“I wished to flee,” said Louis, with desperate and simple majesty. “But where could I flee, except into death? I longed for death. A coldness came over me, and a sensation which assured me that my spirit was dying, my heart was expiring. After a moment or two I felt nothing except paralysis. I felt neither pain nor sorrow; I was no longer a man. This sensation has not passed. It is with me still. I am afraid,” he added, in a lower tone, “that I have truly died.”
The Cardinal murmured softly. Then, in the gentlest of voices, he said: “But this is not the symbol of death of the heart, my poor young friend. It is the mournful and unreconciled agony of a wounded soul that has temporarily lost all interest in men and all communication with God, from very exhaustion resulting from too strong a sensibility. You are too intense. Ah, I have read the strong emotions under that calm exterior of yours, Louis! Those who suffer and rejoice too strongly are vulnerable to all the disembodied storms and visitations which infest the universe. They are leaves in the wind. But, take heart. Men like yourself are beloved of God, for their consciousness of Him is tremendous. They can become saints, or devils, more easily than others.”
Louis looked at him with an earnest passion, hanging on his words.
“How can Monseigneur understand this, for surely he has not felt this, himself!”
The Cardinal smiled in a peculiar way, and his eyes shifted.
Louis’ desperate passion mounted.
“Today,” he cried, “I have felt that I want neither the love of men nor God! I do not want even death!”
The Cardinal was surprised. He had not suspected that Louis was capable of such extremities of emotion and misery. He had thought him inspired only by hatred. For a moment his unfathomable eyes softened in spite of himself. He felt a mysterious motion of his heart, such as a man feels in his amazement when recognizing a brother behind the face of a stranger. Pity took him by the throat. Such a man as this, he thought, had better be dead, for he lacks the implacability which is in myself. He is too single-hearted, and, paradoxically, too strong.
He began to speak, with a low and unaccustomed hesitation, watching Louis closely, meanwhile:
“I have often thought, Louis, that there is a hunger in you, a want, both of the spirit and the body. You lack a certain joyousness, though you are still young. But, alas, it is not age only that brings with it the dark void of weariness. I have seen old men laugh with joy at the morning, and young men hang themselves for very emptiness of heart. It is that which afflicts you: an emptiness of heart!”
Louis listened with an intensity that betrayed how closely the Cardinal had touched him. His large smooth lips shook; desperate hunger glittered in his eyes.
The Cardinal did not look directly at him now, but gazed at the shining windows reflectively.
“We are priests, Louis, dedicated to God. But we are also men. For the health of our souls, we ought not to deprive ourselves of female companionship.”
Louis sprang to his feet, his face flaming. Breath came harshly through his clenched teeth. He tried to speak, but could not. The Cardinal, out of the corner of his eyes, observed these phenomena, with mingled surprise and amused cunning.
Richelieu placed the tips of his fingers delicately together, and allowed an expression of melancholy gentleness to pervade his features.
“Female society brings with it a soothing quality; the uses of a woman’s mind are sweet as April rain. Purged of the purely sensual elements which afflict and burn the average man, a priest may find a lofty delight in association with women, especially if these women possess intelligence, wit, and sensibility. If temptation arises, the priest possesses a spiritual fortitude which enables him to resist in silence. Out of that inner conflict, the priest attains a greater strength.”
Now he turned his eyes mildly upon Louis. The young man had been listening as though he had been attending the words of an archangel. His lips were trembling.
Ah ha! though the Cardinal. So, I have it!
“Reflect,” he continued, tranquilly, and with a pure and steadfast look. “Do not deprive yourself of permitted and unsullied joys. Such was not the intention of God, except for those who feel called to the cloistered life. But you and I, Louis, live in a world of men. And women.”
Louis spoke in a quivering voice, which would have given a pang to a less venal and terrible man: “Your Eminence has rescued me—! He has given me hope, removed the blackness of guilt from my heart—!”
The Cardinal put his hand to his lips to conceal an irrepressible smile. But his eyes remained serious and gentle.
“Guilt, Louis? What imagination is yours! How you young devotees torture yourselves, when a moment’s conversation with one who understands can relieve your self-flagellations!”
Louis sat down abruptly, for his legs were shaking too violently to sustain his weight. He leaned forward towards the Cardinal, and his face was living flesh and no longer marble.
“I have been guilty, then, of defiling myself in my thoughts, Monseigneur! I have sullied innocence with evil imaginings. What I thought was wickedness, then, is pure and natural. Alas, I can plainly see that my mind is vicious—” He paused, unable to continue.
The Cardinal raised his hand with a gesture of ineffable affection.
“You see, Louis, you run to extremes. Remember, at all times, priest though you are, you are only a man, with a man’s self-deception. Partake of innocent joys and tender companionship. They will not debase you.”
Louis was silent. He heaved deep and releasing breaths. Joy glimmered on his broad white brow. The Cardinal was flooded with revivifying and malignant amusement.
Near the fireplace was another door, smaller and not so massive as the door leading to the ante-chamber where those who desired an audience with the Cardinal waited. Now there came a short and peremptory knock on this door.
“Ah,” said Richelieu, “it is our dear Père Joseph! He returned this morning. Bid him enter, Louis.”
As in a bemused dream, the young priest rose and walked with a faltering step to the door. The Cardinal watched his passage, and a glittering pinpoint of light brightened in his eyes.