Chapter 11

That evening, Charles stood in the doorway of one of the large salons, watching the famed Versailles gambling. This salon was for cards, and in the one beyond, a lottery was in progress. Candles in tall lampstands were set along the tables, bathing the piles of coins in gold and silver aureoles. As the gamblers’ stakes changed hands, shouts of triumph and disappointment rose to the ceiling, which was painted, appropriately enough, with scenes of Fortune and her wheel. The king himself was there, strolling sedately through the room, his gentlemen following at a distance as he spoke amiably to the gamblers. La Chaise had said that the gambling tables were the only place where anyone and everyone could sit in the presence of the king, and indeed, as Louis passed through the room, no one rose. Some of the players barely noticed him, avid as they were for their games. Besides the usual lotteries, there were card games: lansquenet, reversis, and bassette. There was even a hoca board at a corner table, though the notorious game had been banned from Paris years ago, after it ruined too many citizens.

“Have you come to pray for us, maître?” The young Duc du Maine paused beside Charles in the wide doorway. “I could use your prayers against the Prince de Conti.”

Maine nodded toward a table farther down the room, and Charles saw Conti lounging in a chair, gazing expressionlessly at the cards in his hands. The Grand Duchess of Tuscany sat on his left, her yellow wig clashing with her crimson bodice and slipping a little sideways as she tried shamelessly to see what he held. Across the table from them, rings flashed on the fingers of three men hunched over their cards, murmuring to each other and glancing unhappily at Conti from time to time.

“How the Prince of Conti plays so well I can never understand.” Maine smiled ruefully. “I keep thinking that I’ve watched him and learned, but I always lose. It makes Madame de Maintenon furious, but she never comes to the gambling, so I’m safe till someone tells her. Or till I have to borrow money from her to pay him back!”

Fascinated by this glimpse of royal life, Charles couldn’t help asking, “Does she lend it?”

“Usually. But with very high interest—I have to listen to long and severe lectures on my morals and my duty as a prince.” The boy’s smile was irresistibly sweet. “But if you pray for me tonight… is there a patron saint of gambling, I wonder?”

“I’ve never thought to wonder that,” Charles said, laughing. Then, wickedly, “Shall we ask Père La Chaise?” He inclined his head toward the adjoining salon. “He’s just there in the buffet room.”

Maine grinned. “Yes, let’s!” But then he looked suddenly down the room. “The king is coming this way,” he said urgently, and his hand went to his hat.

Louis was making straight for them—or for the door, Charles hoped. Charles stepped aside and snatched off his bonnet. Maine made his bow and Louis paused, his eyes resting warmly on his son. Then the king turned his gaze, so like Maine’s, on Charles, who clutched his bonnet as though it were a lifeline and hoped he didn’t look as hunted as he felt. There was a deep, watching quiet about Louis that Charles found oddly disconcerting. This was not a man easily fooled.

“Père La Chaise informs me that you are persuading Our unhappy daughter to a more seemly acceptance of her duty,” the king said. “You have Our thanks.” He added, “She is at the lottery table in the next room. There is no other door from that salon except the one you see from here.”

Louis walked serenely on. Charles let his held breath go and looked down at his half-crushed bonnet. He felt as though Louis had hung Lulu around his neck.

“I esteem him above all men on earth,” Maine said, his eyes following the royal back. “But—” He sighed.

“But it is not easy being his son,” Charles hazarded.

The boy nodded feelingly. “You can have no idea. He is kindness itself to me. But still, how can one ever please a—a—well, a god, almost? A hero, at the least!”

Charles thought of all the Jesuit college ballets he’d seen in which the king was depicted as Hercules. Or Apollo or Jupiter. No, it couldn’t be easy to be Louis’s son. Or daughter. It was difficult enough being one of Louis’s anonymous subjects—and it seemed to Charles now that he was no longer anonymous.

Maine drew closer. “But do you know who I feel most sorry for? His real son, Louis. The Dauphin, I mean—he’s the one who matters, because he is legitimate and will rule after him. And our father is so constantly disappointed in him, because the poor Dauphin isn’t—well—very quick. And that disappointment has made the Dauphin terrified of most everything.”

“That’s very unfortunate,” Charles said thoughtfully, remembering what he’d heard from Conti and his coterie in the garden. A terrified king would be a gold mine of opportunity to that little coven.

“Well, I must go now and lose my pretty shirt,” Maine said, shrugging off the realm’s future. “Unless you can discover which saint to pray to!” He smiled at Charles and went eagerly to where the Prince of Conti sat, raking a pile of gold coins called louis toward him.

Charles moved a little aside from the door, beyond a potted orange tree, and stood against the wall’s dark silk brocade. From there he could look for Lulu, and also watch Conti and Margot, without being much noticed. A gambling evening was not a usual place for a Jesuit, however, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable. Not because he’d never gambled. Far from it—soldiers endured long hours of boredom when not marching or fighting, and dice and cards helped to pass the time. But that was a long time ago. And the stakes he’d played for then were nothing compared to the fortunes spread out on these tables. As the candlelight from the tables lit the gamblers and their money, it threw dancing shadows into the salon’s corners, where Charles could easily believe that the patient specter of ruin waited for its prey.

His attention sharpened as he saw Lulu, changed now into a gown of tawny gold satin, come slowly from the lottery room and stop at Conti’s table. Her gown shone like the sun, but her face was pinched and shadowed. She leaned down to speak to Maine, her brother, who was sitting on Margot’s left. Then she sat in the empty chair on Conti’s right. Margot was frowning blackly at her cards and ignored the newcomer. Conti glanced sideways and gave Lulu an absent smile, but his real attention was all for the game. One of Lulu’s hands disappeared under the table. After a moment, Conti’s eyebrows lifted and his free hand disappeared likewise. Well, Charles thought, that doesn’t look to me like resignation to Conti’s indifference. Or perhaps Conti was only giving her a little brotherly comfort? But Charles had sisters, and a girl’s face didn’t look like that for a brother. He wondered if the girl was trying again to persuade Conti to help her stay in France. A forlorn hope, from everything he’d seen of the man.

The play at Conti’s table went on. The prince’s hand emerged from under the table and he threw his cards down, laughing uproariously as he raked in everyone else’s coins.

“You devil!” one of the men across the table said wryly. “How do you do it, Your Highness?”

The Duc du Maine was frowning sadly at his cards, as though Madame de Maintenon’s lecture already sounded in his ears. Lulu looked quickly around the room and then flung her arms around Conti and kissed him on the cheek.

“Well done!” she cried. “What a useful stake you are gathering! With my help, of course.”

That got her a quick—and, Charles thought, hunted—look from Conti.

“My thanks, Your Highness, your beauty always brings me luck,” he said loudly and formally, for the table of players more than for her, Charles thought, and turned back to the next game.

Lulu looked as though she’d been slapped. “But you give me nothing in return.”

She stood up, knocking her chair backward onto the polished floor, and Charles glimpsed the fury he’d seen in her eyes when she looked at her father during the ball. She hovered over Conti for a moment, clearly hoping to be drawn down beside him again, but he made no move and she turned blindly away from the table. Charles moved closer to the doorway.

“Bonsoir, Your Highness,” he said quietly, steadying her as she nearly walked into him. She pulled her arm out of his grasp and wiped her tear-blinded eyes with the cream-colored lace of her sleeve, then brushed past him into the adjoining salon, where the buffet tables were set up.

He watched her go, remembering the way she’d walked away from him earlier and hating his uselessness. He hoped she would stay in the salon so he wouldn’t have to follow and hound her. About God or anything else.

He looked into the buffet salon. Most of the courtiers were still hard at their gambling, so there were only a few people around the tables. Lulu stood beside a towering pyramid of summer fruit. La Chaise, standing with the king at the other end of the room, caught Charles’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly toward her. A wave of revulsion hit Charles, revulsion toward himself and his failure, this place, the king, the careful plans of power. He wanted to walk out of his cassock, out of his own skin, out of Versailles, and back home to Languedoc.

But Lulu was disappearing through the salon doors. Gritting his teeth, Charles hurried after her. Each of these salons opened into the next, a long chain of them. He was starting to feel like he’d spent half his life trudging across the palace galleries’ black-and-white stone floors. He’d even dreamed of their checkerboard pattern the night before, and had seen himself running desperately after something or someone, disappearing always farther into the dark in front of him.

And Lulu was disappearing now, though the salons in this royal center of the palace were all brightly lit. She turned suddenly through a small side door. A pair of women were coming toward Charles, and since he didn’t want to be seen going after Lulu, he stopped in pretended admiration of a painting of Diana and her nymphs, waiting for the women to pass. But they stopped, too.

“Very pretty,” one of them said. Her ivory silk skirts rustled like dead leaves as she pressed close to Charles under the pretense of looking at the painting. “How do you like Versailles, maître? You are not yet a priest, we understand.”

“Not yet, madame.” He edged away and bowed slightly, as though to let them go on their way, but they stayed where they were.

The other woman kept her distance, but looked him up and down as though considering buying him. “How long will you stay at court?”

“Not much longer, madame.”

“Such a change for you from your college.”

“Yes. And now I must take myself to my quarters, mesdames. The hours of the court are too much for a simple Jesuit.”

They shrieked with merriment. “Simple Jesuit? What a wit you are!”

Desperate to be rid of them and afraid he’d already lost Lulu’s trail, he walked firmly away in the direction they’d come from. To his relief, they went on toward the gambling rooms, chattering and laughing. When he glanced back, they were far enough away for him to sprint back to the half-open door Lulu had gone through. The small room beyond, lit by a pair of candles on a table in its center, was empty. A place to leave food and drink till it was needed to replenish the buffet, he guessed from the platters of cheese and pastries on the tables, and the cupboards that lined the walls. At first, he thought Lulu had vanished into the air, but then he saw yet another door in the right-hand wall.

He went softly around the table and eased the small door open. The candles behind him lit the mouth of a narrow flight of stairs leading upward. He listened, heard nothing, and ventured onto the stairs. It was only a half flight and brought him to a dark corridor, so low-ceilinged he couldn’t stand upright. Deserted, it was lit by a single candle in a sconce at the stairhead and lined with closed doors whose lintels were perhaps five feet from the floor. Peering at the little doors, he lifted his head and unwarily collided with the ceiling. Glad for the cushioning of the stiff bonnet, he rubbed his head. These could only be servants’ rooms, a sort of mezzanine inserted between two ordinary floors. Well, he told himself, many people had less and worse. But why did they have to have so little here at the heart of luxury, where the courtiers sat on silver benches? He pulled himself back to more immediate problems.

Lulu was hardly likely to be in a servant’s room. Bent uncomfortably to one side, he started toward the far end of the passage to see if there were stairs there, thinking that perhaps she’d come this way as a shortcut to somewhere else. He was halfway along the corridor when something grabbed his cassock skirt. He yelped in surprise and jumped away from whatever it was, but a small voice commanded,

“Shhh! In here!”

Anne-Marie de Bourbon pulled him through one of the little doors and shut it. Charles found himself in nearly complete darkness, with something panting and jumping against his legs.

The dog, Louis, he realized, and squatted down to where he thought the child was.

“What are you doing here, Your Serene Highness? Why—”

“Hush!” She clutched his arm, an agony of fear in her voice. “He’ll hear you!”

“Who? What game are you playing?”

“It isn’t a game! Louis got away and I chased him up here. We had to hide because I heard someone coming and I’m not supposed to come here.” He felt her shiver. “So I came in here. At least it’s empty. The servants don’t go to bed till after we do. Then I looked out and—”

“There’s no one out there now, so you and Louis can—”

“No, listen! I opened the door a little crack to see who was coming and it was Lulu. She went into the room across the passage. It’s the footman Bouchel’s and he’s still in there!”

Charles was glad the darkness hid his astonishment. “With Lulu?”

“No, she left. She was crying and very angry. They were shouting at each other.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard them. Some of it, anyway. At first, I could just hear voices, but not what they said. Then she got louder and started crying and told him he had to help her. He tried to hush her, but she wouldn’t be quiet. He was talking louder, too. He said he’d tried to protect her and what else could he do? He sounded like he was almost crying. Then something crashed against the wall and she ran out into the passage. Maître, she told him that if he didn’t help her get away, she would kill herself!” Anne-Marie’s small hand was shaking. “I’m so worried! I know she’s unhappy about the marriage—but to go to a servant for help? And to say she’ll commit a mortal sin if she has to go to Poland? Please, she likes you, please talk to her and make her see she cannot do that, even if—”

He heard her catch her breath. “Even if what?”

“Just keep her from doing anything terrible!”

“Your Serene Highness, you saw this morning that I can’t make her do anything.”

But Charles thought suddenly of the lake, and his own fears rose. “Do you have any idea where she’s gone? Are there stairs at the far end of the passage?”

“Yes, she went that way.”

The chapel lay in that direction. Charles hoped against hope that Lulu had taken her lonely misery to St. Ursula, that other beleaguered virgin. Or had at least taken refuge there until she had herself in hand again.

“Maybe she’s gone to the chapel,” he said.

“She might go there. I’m coming with you.”

As Charles pulled the door open, the dog darted into the passage, and the door across the way began to open. Charles ducked out of the room, pulled the door shut behind him, and was leaning against it when Bouchel ducked through his own doorway into the passage.

“Ah, bonsoir, Bouchel,” Charles said, wiping his forehead as though he’d been running.

“What—what are you doing here?”

“Chasing Mademoiselle d’Enghien’s little dog,” Charles said, with a tolerant smile. “And now I’ll have to chase him farther, he’s gone that way.” He nodded toward the far end of the corridor.

“Oh. Yes. He’ll have gone down the stairs there.” Bouchel wiped his hands over his face and through his hair.

He looked, Charles thought, like a man who’d just taken a heavy blow. “I thought earlier that you seemed unwell. You look as though you’re feeling worse.”

“Oh. No. No, not at all!” The whites of Bouchel’s dark brown eyes flared in the dim light. “I just came up to—to see to something. They’ll be after me, I must go back now.”

As Bouchel ran unceremoniously down the near stairs, Charles stood staring after him and wondering why in God’s name Lulu had gone to the footman.

Behind him, Anne-Marie pushed her way into the passage. “See? I told you. We have to find her!”

Together they returned to the ground floor and found Louis happily wolfing down cake someone had dropped. Anne-Marie picked him up and started toward the chapel. The salons here were nearly deserted, since most everyone made a point of being seen at the gambling. He is a man I never see was the worst thing King Louis could say of anyone entitled to be at court.

When they reached the Salon of Abundance at the east end of the chain, out of which the chapel opened, Charles stopped in the doorway. “Wait,” he said softly to Anne-Marie.

At this hour the chapel was lit only by the salon’s few candles shining behind them and by the small lamp on the high altar. He heard clothing rustle and gripped Anne-Marie’s shoulder to keep her from rushing into the dark. Then he heard a metallic sound and what sounded like the whispering of skirts.

“Stay here.” He walked toward the sound.

He could just make out Lulu crouching at the foot of the side altar where the reliquary was. “Your Highness?”

She straightened.“There was no need to come hunting me.” Her voice was chilly and remote.

“Anne—I mean Mademoiselle d’Enghien—was worried about you. She heard you in Bouchel’s room.”

“In—? No, she is lying.”

Flying feet came down the chapel aisle and Anne-Marie flung herself at Lulu, holding to her skirts. “I am not lying; you were there, you shouted at him, you said you would kill yourself. I was so frightened!”

Lulu sighed but made no move to comfort her. “Very well. Since you spied on me, yes, I did ask Bouchel’s help. He has always seemed—very kind.” She shrugged disdainfully. “And he’s a peasant. That kind of person always wants money, and I thought I might be able to bribe him to help me run away. He won’t. There. Now you know. And I know what I must do. And there’s an end of it.”

“But you said you would kill yourself! Lulu, you mustn’t even think that, you can’t—”

“Don’t be silly.” She put Anne-Marie gently but firmly aside. “Children are so tiresomely fanciful,” she said to Charles, and swept out of the chapel.

He put out a hand to stop Anne-Marie from following her. “Let her be. She doesn’t want either of us just now.”

“I know that.” The little girl twisted out of his grasp and faced him. He half expected tears, but she said fiercely, “You see? There’s only you and me to care about her. Someone has to help her, but no one will, because they’re afraid of the king. So what are you going to do?”

Charles looked warily at her. This one could probably lead armies. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “I’m leaving very soon. I can tell Père La Chaise I’m worried about her.”

She sighed impatiently. “That won’t help. Lulu doesn’t like him; she won’t listen to him.” Her hazel-gold hawk’s eyes caught light from the altar lamp as she looked up at him. “I see that I must tell you. Listen. After the Comte de Fleury—”

Louis began to bark in the aisle as heavy footsteps pounded into the chapel.

“Your Serene Highness! Come here. At once!”

“Hell’s lecherous devils!” Anne-Marie said startlingly, looking over her shoulder. “I am busy, madame.”

“Come this moment. Your father is having a fit, asking where you are!”

“My father is always having a fit.” Anne-Marie turned back to Charles. “It’s my nurse. She never pays any attention to me unless my father asks where I am. Please, we must talk. Tomorrow?”

Before Charles could answer, the stout, dark-gowned woman, visible only in outline against the candlelight beyond the chapel, reached the side altar and gasped when she realized he was there.

“Who are you? What do you mean, being here alone with this child?” She took the little girl by the hand and pulled her away as though Charles had the plague. Scolding her without pause, she walked Anne-Marie out of the chapel.

Torn between fears for Lulu, worry over what Anne-Marie wanted to tell him, and his own fervent desire to be gone at first light and leave them both to others, Charles went slowly back to the evening’s festivities.

He found the buffet salon in an uproar. It was crowded with exclaiming, pushing courtiers, and someone had apparently been shoved into a table, because a bright flood of fruit was being crushed underfoot. Charles kicked a plum aside and tried to get nearer the confusion’s center to see what had happened. A woman’s wail rose above the noise.

“Dear Blessed Virgin, it’s just like the Comte de Fleury! Oh, Saint Benoit, protect him!”

St. Benedict? Benedict was the patron invoked against poison. Charles elbowed his way ruthlessly through a swath of outraged courtiers. Then someone shouted a command and the crowd parted to make way for the physician Neuville and Père La Chaise, supporting the king between them. Louis was hatless, his face white and sheened with sweat, and he walked slightly bent over, one hand pressed tightly to his stomach. He looked as though it was taking all his will to hold his mouth clamped shut. On the other side of La Chaise, the tearful Dauphin clutched his father’s black-and-white hat to his chest, and the Prince of Conti leaned at the Dauphin’s ear, murmuring solicitously. The covey of noblemen who attended the king came crowding behind them.

“Make way, for the love of God!” the doctor shouted again, and Charles leaped to clear a knot of stupefied courtiers out of the royally urgent path to the door.

As he passed, La Chaise said to Charles, “Go back to my chamber and wait.”

“Yes, mon père.” But instead of leaving immediately, Charles turned to the woman standing beside him. “What happened? I only just arrived.”

Two men drew near to listen to her answer. Her diamond earrings danced in the candlelight as she shook her head. “I hardly know. I was playing reversis and the king was standing beside our table. He suddenly turned away and—well—doubled over—and was sick.” She put a hand to her heavily powdered throat and stared at Charles in bewilderment, as though she’d just seen the sun rise in the west. “No one has ever seen him sick in public. We know he is ill from time to time. But he never lets us see it. Even when he had his operation in the winter, he was giving audiences and orders from his bed later that same day! One knew he had to be in pain, but he gave no sign at all. But this—he could not control himself at all, and—dear Blessed Virgin, what if he dies?”

“Madame,” Charles said, “I think you are jumping too far ahead. Who can control himself when the urge to spew comes on him?”

“I know. But—” Her small black eyes were full of fear. “—he’s not like us. He is the king!”

And Jupiter never vomits, Charles thought, mentally casting his eyes up. He turned away with a small nod, but the older of the two listening men, perhaps fifty or so, put out a hand to detain him. Charles knew he should know who the man was but couldn’t name him. The man glanced in the direction the king had gone and then back to Charles.

“Like the Comte de Fleury,” the man said quietly.

“Only, thank God, there were no stairs here,” his companion put in. He was the lynx-eyed man who’d baited La Chaise in the gallery after Fleury fell.

“You mistake me,” the older man replied impatiently. He looked at Charles. “Perhaps I should have said, exactly like Fleury. Because, may God help us, it looks to me as though someone has poisoned the king.” His words had the heavy finality of a tolling bell.

“Oh, dear. Then all we can do now is pray,” the other said, but his words were light as air. He excused himself and went quickly toward the doors.

“Poisoned how?” Charles said brusquely. “Where?”

The older man gestured gracefully toward the tables.

“That can’t be!” Charles said. “Unless you think it was random and any victim would have done? Anyone and everyone might have been poisoned, if it was in something on the tables.”

“Don’t be absurd, of course I don’t mean that.”

“Then what do you mean?”

The man inclined his head very slightly in the direction the younger man had gone.

Charles shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”

The nameless man looked casually over both shoulders and scanned the knot of gesticulating, hysterically whispering courtiers beyond Charles. “Come.” Without seeming to be going anywhere in particular, he drew Charles after him into a corner. They stood sideways against the wall, watching over each other’s shoulders and speaking so that their words would not carry out into the room. The man murmured, “It would not be so hard to do. The king loves sweets. And the best of the sweets are always offered first to him. Do you think he serves himself at the buffet? Of course he doesn’t. He points and nods and someone fills a plate for him. And until he has eaten from the buffet, no one else can take anything.”

Charles thought about that. He’d seen the king standing with La Chaise near the tables early in the evening. Neither had been eating then, but they might have eaten from the buffet before he saw them.

As though reading his thoughts, his companion said, “The king always goes immediately to the tables and has something, so that we aren’t kept from refreshing ourselves.” He raised an eyebrow. “I believe that tonight it was your Père La Chaise who served him.”

Charles gaped at the man. “Are you accusing Père La Chaise? That’s absurd!” Giving up the effort to identify the man and preserve the courtesies, he said bluntly, “Who are you?”

His companion seemed equally uninterested in the courtesies. “I am not accusing him at all. I am simply saying it would have been possible. Someone else may well have brought the king more to eat a little later. I was only briefly in this room before I went to the gambling.” He smiled slightly at Charles. “I am the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. And you are Maître Charles du Luc. You and Père Jouvancy and your companions ate at my table the day Père Jouvancy became so ill. You may just as well say that I poisoned him. Though I didn’t.” He made Charles a small ironic bow. “Nor did I poison the Comte de Fleury, who ate at my table the day he died. Though I am well aware of what is being said.”

“I am glad to hear it.” Charles folded his hands at his waist. “Forgive me, monsieur, but it seems to me that everyone at court is obsessed with poison. We have had a very bad stomach sickness and fever going the rounds in Paris. Père Jouvancy had been ill with it before we came, and I feel sure he has only had a relapse. So why not assume that the illness has reached Versailles? And that the Comte de Fleury had it, and now so has the king.”

“Logical, I grant you. And if some kind, innocuous man had broken his neck on the way to the privy, I might think as you do. But the Comte de Fleury was not innocuous, as I think you know. I was there in the gallery when he fell. I saw you recognize him. Oh, yes, it showed.”

“I was a soldier under his command.”

“Ah. Then you do know how well hated he was. Half the court would trade its palace lodgings for a look at Fleury’s reputed journal, to be sure they are not included. But the thing seems to have disappeared.”

“So I’ve heard. I grant you that more than a few might have willingly killed Fleury. Are you saying that the king is also well hated?”

“What king is not?” La Rochefoucauld replied.

“Then the question becomes, who hates him most?” Charles stared at the rapidly shifting groups of men and women telling each other that the king had been poisoned, that the king could not possibly have been poisoned, that their aunt had had that same sickness last week in Paris, that they knew for certain who had poisoned the king, that no one would ever know who had poisoned the king.

“And who would your choice be for that position?”

“The Prince of Conti.”

La Rochefoucauld’s eyebrows rose, and he half bowed. “The Society of Jesus’ reputation for quickness of observation continues to be well deserved.”

“Does that mean you agree with me?”

“I am not naive enough to answer that, Maître du Luc. But I have long observed the Prince of Conti gathering a devoted coterie of men around him.”

“Around him or around the Dauphin?”

“Conti pretends that they have gathered around the Dauphin. The king would give a great deal to be rid of Conti, but it is not easy to be rid of a Prince of the Blood.”

“Louis the Thirteenth rid himself of his brother Gaston.”

“After extreme provocation. Conti is, so far, too wise to offer provocation quite so extreme.”

“Poisoning would seem about as extreme as provocation gets.”

“You can be sure that if the king was poisoned tonight, it was not by Conti’s own hand, whatever his mind had to do with it. If the king were to die, the Dauphin would be king. And Conti would be safe, because I doubt the poor Dauphin has the guts to rid himself of a mouse in his chamber. So where’s the risk?”

“Assuming the king dies.”

“Assuming that. Bonne nuit, maître.”