The Cat and the King (8 page)

Conti now proceeded to relate to me, as we walked our horses slowly across country, the story of his affair with the duchesse de Bourbon. It took the rest of our ride, and he had to finish it in his suite at Meudon over a bottle of wine. I have tried to put together his account as I remember it, but no doubt some of my own style will have crept in. Everything about Conti was beautiful, so my impression of the whole may have embellished the parts to something more than they were as spoken.

I
THINK
you know, Saint-Simon, that I was a special favorite of my father's older brother, the prince de Condé, known as the ‘Great Condé.' My uncle's own children were small in stature and inept at sport, and he set great store by these things. Also, poor creatures, they were sadly plain, and he admired good looks, even such slight ones as your humble friend may be blessed—or cursed—with. I was immensely proud of the hero's esteem, but I paid a heavy price for it, first in the bitter resentment and jealousy of my cousins, and second (and more important) in the intense anxiety that it generated in me as to whether I could ever turn into a soldier remotely worthy of such inflated admiration.

I made long visits as a youth to Chantilly and rode and shot with my uncle and spent the evenings by the fire listening to him discourse on his campaigns in the Lowlands, in Spain, and in our poor divided France of Fronde days, when he was in arms against his own sovereign. Of course, it was not the boy king that he had hated but my mother's uncle, the wily Mazarin, and it spoke worlds for Condé's devotion to myself that he was able to overlook my relationship to his villain. Still another reason that I should have to prove my manliness in his eyes! I learned about all his battles, all his campaigns; I studied each maneuver and tactic; I could identify every officer in the huge dusky battle canvases that filled the great hall. I remember that my mother, who had some of the Mazarin nose for detrimental anecdote, used to say that it was a regrettable touch of vanity in an otherwise great man to have included in his military gallery pictures of his defeats of the troops of his own nation. It amused her that these were signalized by the addition of the muse of history in the upper-left-hand corner veiling her eyes from the scene! But I found Mother simply irreverent. The Great Condé was to me without fault.

It has become fashionable to look back upon the age of the Fronde as one when the great nobles petulantly and childishly sacrificed the peace of the realm to their own personal bickering. We have come to see it as a time when civil war was looked upon as a kind of sport for the upper classes, when pitched battles took the place of the boar hunt, and the siege of citadels that of the chess game. All this, allegedly at the expense of the starved poor, is now contrasted unfavorably to the order and stability of our own era, when the quarrelsome peers and princes have been safely domesticated at Versailles. But I impenitently mourn those more vivid days.

Anyone, surely, would have to admit their sharper color, their acuter flavor. I never tired of hearing not only of the warriors—of Beaufort, Turenne, Villeroi, and my own father—but of the great ladies so close to the battles, sometimes actually commanding on besieged ramparts—my gallant aunt de Longueville, the intrepid duchesse de Chevreuse, and the great Mademoiselle herself, the king's cousin. I thrilled at my uncle's description of the latter, striding in scarlet equestrian habit along the parapets of the Bastille and giving the signal with her raised riding crop for the cannon to open fire on the royal troops. Corneille, I was sure, had found in these Amazons the models for his great pagan queens: Sophonisbe, Viriate, Pulchérie.

My trouble was that I came to see war, subjectively, as a kind of test of the manhood of François de Bourbon-Conti. There can be tremendous egotism in an awed and bashful boy. Mighty, menacing, glorious as these figures of my uncle's tales seemed to me, I had nonetheless a fantasy in which they existed principally as a challenge to myself. I never made the smallest connection between warfare and any benefit to a conquering, or detriment to a conquered, people. No, it existed simply to prove who were men and who were not. It was the sport of gods. It was glory, and without glory, life was a thing of baubles and ribbons, of bows and curtsies. Without glory, life was Versailles.

It was inevitable that I should choose an army career, and I shall never forget the terrified anxiety that attended my first campaign. I was literally sick with fear that I should prove a disappointment to my uncle. He was no longer, of course, on active duty. He was old, and, as it later turned out, already dying, but I knew that he had officers who would tell him of my every move, and that he looked to me to carry on the glory of his name. I was not, certainly, a good officer in that first action. Nobody can be a good officer who is more obsessed with looking brave than with defeating the enemy. But my responsibilities were fortunately few, and it did not affect the tide of battle that I was so intent on exposing myself to danger. Happily, I was noticed, not for exposure but for courage; the dispatches mentioned me, and my uncle had some slight reason to be satisfied before he closed his eyes for the last time. Another example of the grossness of my egotism was that I cared more to learn that he had died informed of my gallantry than that he had died! And yet I suppose I loved the grizzled old war horse as much as, until then, I had loved a human being.

I offer this background because it is necessary if you are to understand what happened to me when, after five years of vigorous campaigns, the king summarily removed me from the front and stationed me at Versailles. I was given no place in his council, no function in his court. My wife and I had little relationship. I had not been her choice, any more than she had been mine. She was, of course, the Great Condé's granddaughter, but even this was not a bond, for she, like most of her family, had hated him. What was I to do with my life at Versailles? I turned to cards, to women, to wine—to too much of all of them—and then, in my extremity—to the other thing. I suppose, as I had always associated court life with the effeminate, the unmanly, there was a kind of crazy logic in my crowning my activities with what I deemed the most unmanly conduct of all. It was a species of suicide.

My experiments in the “Italian” vice, however, never had the effect of weaning me from the other sex, and it was during my brief affair with Madame de Creon that I incurred the hostility of my wife's sister-in-law, the duchesse de Bourbon. The latter and I had at first respected each other's wit and taste; there had even been a time, shortly after we had both been married off to grandchildren of the Great Condé, when we had seemed to eye each other with the prospect of a still closer relationship. I had been attracted from the beginning to that diminutive vision of pale skin and raven hair and those sparkling dark eyes. But Madame la Duchesse's wit, which had been my delight on leaves from the army, began to seem too corrosive when I was forced into a life of idleness. I tended now to identify her with the king. Her father had ruined my life, and his jokes at my expense began to take on the aspect of a jeering commentary from the paternal compound. What was she but part and parcel of the whole vicious apotheosis of Louis XIV?

I was too much of a gentleman to hold her bastardy against her, but it nonetheless had the effect of linking her in my mind to the unlawfulness of much of what the king was doing. And so it took very little to bring my feelings towards her to active animosity. She objected to my intrigue with Madame de Creon because the testy officious little due de Bourbon had an eye for that lady himself, and Madame la Duchesse encouraged his infidelities as an excuse for her own!

At the king's supper, one night, when I found myself seated by Madame la Duchesse, she turned to me with a small smirk and asked me:

“What should I call the little Creon? My lover-in-law? One needs some term like that, don't you think? We have so many new relationships in court these days.”

“You might call her ‘lover legitimated.'”

“Fie, prince, put back your velvet glove. That's too blunt a blow for a man of your wit.”

“Your turn, then. I bare my chest. Strike!”

She looked at me as if she were searching the most vulnerable spot. “They called our grandfather-in-law the Great Condé for his conquest of enemy territory. I think we'll call you the Great Conti for your occupation of areas that are... shall we say, less rigorously defended?”

This bold association of my name with the female sex organ in the presence and almost within the hearing of the king would normally have made me roar with laughter. But the use of obscenity to dramatize the contrast of my present life with the glorious past of my hero made me so indignant that the tone of my response must have been actually grating.

“It's your father's fault that I live as I do! Why don't you use your influence to get me a command?”

“And be the cause of sending you away from court? Be the possible agent of some damage to those beautiful features? Ah, no, dear prince, a thousand ladies would scratch my eyes out!”

I turned away from her, too wrathful to trust my speaking tone. The king, at any rate, was about to rise, and I noted that he had observed us. Had there been a hint of disapproval in those opaque eyes at the animation of our discourse? The king, I knew, with Madame de Maintenon, tried to keep Madame la Duchesse's conduct at least outwardly respectable. He deplored in his children any activity that recalled his own lascivious past and framed in irony his present stiff morality. Any association with a man of my descending reputation would be just what he desired the least. Which was just what gave me my idea.

I would become the lover of Madame la Duchesse! It would be an exquisite combination of revenge and pleasure. I determined to set about it at once, and the very next day I presented myself at the apartment of Madame de Maintenon at a time when I knew my prey would be there.

“So, prince, you are seeking respectable company for a change!” Madame de Maintenon's tone was haughty but not unfriendly. She was always grateful to have the princes of the blood dancing attendance on her. “We are flattered. I am only sorry your dear little wife is not here. She seems to spend more and more time with her mother in Paris these days.”

“She is indeed, ma'am, the very symbol of filial devotion. A saint, I venture to suggest.”

“Well, we could use one in the family.”

I bowed in silence, letting her “family” pass, and then went over to take a seat by Madame la Duchesse.

“What in God's name brings you here?” she challenged me at once. “Do you have the nerve to do your chasing under the very nose of the old prude? Don't forget she was once a governess!” She laughed mockingly. “And mine, too! So it can't be me you're after.” She affected to glance about the room. “Which of these lovelies is it?”

“You needn't look so far.”

“Oh? Is she close?”

“Do you think me so insensible to beauty?”

“You mean
me?
” She burst into another laugh. “Oh, come, prince, don't take me for a complete ass!”

“Why should hearing my suit make you that?”

“Because it's hard enough to find a lover in this court with the smallest amount of genuine affection without picking one who
starts
by disliking me!”

I looked at those flashing eyes and marveled at her candor. She did not even bother to lower her voice. We were just out of earshot of Madame de Maintenon, but almost any other woman in a position as vulnerable as hers would have at least glanced about to check on her safety.

“I don't know why you assume that I dislike you,” I observed in a milder tone.

“Because you have it in for bastards!” she exclaimed. I could hardly believe my ears. Her brother, Maine, and her sister, Blois, would have had their tongues cut out rather than so much as utter that word. “Oh, don't deny it,” she went on. “You think I'm like my sister. You think I consider myself above everybody because I'm the king's daughter. But I know very well what I am, and so does she, for all her airs. Do you ever stop to think what it's like to be a natural child in a palace where the favorite indoor sport is counting quarterings? Well, I'll tell you! You read the sneer behind every courtly bow, the derision behind every curtsy. The king can legitimate us till the cows come home; he can marry us off to princes of the blood; he can elevate us to the stars by decrees; but will that affect by one jot or one tittle the tranquil disdain in the eyes of a hundred little princes de Conti or ducs de Saint-Simon? You know it won't!”

I was a bit ashamed to discover that this perceptive creature should have so easily divined my hostility. Did it not prove that she had more feeling than I had hitherto suspected?

“What makes you assume that I think these things?” I asked.

“I've watched you! I watch dozens of people who never suspect it. My mother used to say that we Mortemarts were born with an eye in the back of our heads.” Here she emitted another high peal of laughter. “As she has never looked back in her life, that must have been how she spotted Monsieur de Montespan's horns!”

I could do nothing better than laugh with her at this. “I wish you would let me at least be your friend. We all need friends at court.”

“Friends? Pooh. What are they? You're like all the handsome men at Versailles. You have the naïveté to believe that the people whom you attract by your charm are better friends than those whom you attract by your rank. They're not. They're all the same. They all desert you at the first whiff of disgrace. What's the difference?”

“If I can't be your friend
or
your lover, what can I be?”

“My brother-in-law!” she exclaimed and turned away to talk to the Maintenon. But the smile that she gave me in parting was far from discouraging.

And so I started to pay my court to Madame la Duchesse. She received my attentions with a smiling acquiescence. She even, after a bit, professed her responding ardor, but always as if we were playing a high comedy in private theatricals. It was impossible to know what she meant. It was impossible, indeed, to know anything about her except that she was thoroughly enjoying herself. She would avow her passion to me in a perfectly normal speaking tone at the jeu du roi, and when Monsieur le Due, small, bustling, officious, jealous, would make his hurried way across the chamber to interrupt us, she would, without a pause, without slurring a syllable, smoothly change the topic to some current bit of court gossip, just as he came up.