La Grande Mademoiselle. Barine Arvède

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ interest in maintaining the enmity between "the King and his own brother," so that the King, "having no one to defend him," could be held more closely in his, Richelieu's, grasp.

      I beseech … your Majesty … to have the gracious prudence to reflect upon what has passed, and to examine more seriously the designs of those who have been the architects of these plans; if you will graciously examine into this matter you will see that there are interests at stake which are not yours, – interests of a nature opposed to your interests, and which aim at something further, and something far in advance of anything that you have thought of up to the present time (March 23, 1631).

      In the following letter Monsieur addresses himself directly to Louis XIII.'s worst sentiments and to his kingly conscience. He feigns to be deeply grieved by the deplorable condition of his brother, who, as he says, is reduced, notwithstanding

      "the very great enlightenment of his mind" to the plight of a puppet … nothing but the shadow of a king, a being deprived of his authority, lacking in power as in will, counted as nothing in his own kingdom, devoid even of the external lustre ordinarily attached to the rank of a sovereign.

      Monsieur declares that Richelieu has left the King

      "nothing but the name and the figure of a king," and that for a time only; for as soon as he has ridded himself of you … and of me! … he means to take the helm and steer the Ship of State in his own name.

      Monsieur depicted the new "Mayor of the Palace" actually reigning in overburdened, crushed, and oppressed France,

      whom he has ruined and whose blood he has sucked pitilessly and without shame. In his own person he has consumed more than two hundred millions since he took the rule of your affairs … and he expends daily, in his own house, ten times more than you do in yours… Let me tell you what I have seen! In your kingdom not one third of your subjects eat bread made of wheat flour; another third eats bread made of oats; and another third not only is reduced to beggary, but it is languishing in need so crying that some are actually starving to death; those who are not dying of hunger are prolonging their lives with acorns, herbs, and like substances, like the lower animals. And they who are least to be pitied among these last are living on bran and on blood which they pick up in the gutters in front of the butchers' shops. I have seen these things with my own eyes, and in different parts of the country, since I left Paris.

      In this Monsieur told the truth. The peasant had come to that point of physical degradation. But his sufferings could not be diminished by provoking a civil war, and Richelieu did not fail to make the fact plain in the polemics of the Recueil, written under his supervision – when it was not written in his own hand. He (Richelieu) defended his policy tooth and nail, he justified his millions, his accumulated official honours.

      One of Monsieur's letters bears copious notes made throughout its length and breadth in the Cardinal's own hand. Without any of the scruples of false shame, he inspired long factums to the glory of the Prime Minister of France.

      In the pages inspired by him there are passages of peculiar inhumanity. In one place, justifying the King for the treatment inflicted upon his mother, he says that "the pain of the nine months that she carried him would have been sold by her at too high a price, had the King, because of it, been forced to let her set fire to his kingdom."25

      Other passages are equally heartless: "Do they blame the Prime Minister for his riches? – and if the King had seen fit to give him more? The King is free to give or to take away. Can he not act his pleasure; who has the right to say him nay?"

      The Recueil shows passages teeming with cynical and pampered pride. In favour of himself Richelieu wrote:

      The production of these great geniuses is not an ordinary bissextile work. Sometimes the revolution of four of Nature's centuries are required for the formation of a mind of such phenomenal proportions, in which are united all the excellencies, any one of which would be enough to set far above the ordinary character of man the being endowed with them. I speak not only of the virtues that are in some sort the essence of the profession made by their united representative types, – Pity, Wisdom, Prudence, Moderation, Eloquence, Erudition, and like attributes, – I speak of other virtues, the characteristic qualities of another and separate order, like those composing the perfections of a chief of war … etc.

      Among the official documents in the volume just quoted are instruments whose publication would have put any man but Gaston d'Orléans under ground for the rest of his days, among other things, his treaty of peace (1632), signed at Béziers (20th September) after the battle of Castelnaudary, where the Duc de Montmorency had been beaten and taken before his eyes. In that treaty Monsieur had pledged himself to abandon his friends, – not to take any interest in those who had been allied with him "on these occasions," and "not to pretend that he had any cause for complaint when the King made them submit to what they deserved." He promised "to love, especially, his cousin Richelieu." In recompense for this promise and the other articles of the treaty the King re-established his brother "in all his rights." As we know, the treaty of Béziers ended nothing. Gaston saw all his partisans beheaded as he recrossed the frontier. He did not enter France to remain there until October, 1634. Then he went home "on the faith" of the King's declaration, which closes the volume. By this declaration Monsieur was again re-established in the enjoyment of all his rights, appanages, pensions, and appointments. For him this was the important article. As Richelieu took the trouble to have all his monuments of egotism and barrenness of heart re-imprinted, it is probable that he did not intend to let the country forget them. In that case he attained his ends.

      The public had formed its opinion, and in consequence it took no further interest in the royal family, always excepting Anne of Austria, who had retired among the shadows.

      Marie de Médicis was now free to cry aloud in her paroxysms of fury. Gaston could henceforth pose as a martyr, and Louis XIII., withered by melancholy, dried remnant of his former pompous dignity, might be blown into a corner or be borne away by the wind like a dead leaf in autumn, and not a soul in France would hail it by the quiver of an eyelash. If Richelieu had hoped that profit would accrue to him from the royal unpopularity he had counted without the great French host. Despite the fact that his importance and the terror he inspired had increased tenfold, he also had become tainted by the insignificance of the royal family. But to all the people he seemed the ogre dreaded by Mademoiselle in her infancy, though indisputedly an unnatural ogre, possessing genius far beyond the reach of the normal man. He was universally looked upon as a leader of priceless value to a country in its hour of crisis, and as a companion everything but desirable. He appalled the people. His first interviews with Gaston after the young Prince's return to France were terrible. Monsieur was defenceless; the Cardinal was pitiless.

      "Mademoiselle had run ahead to meet her father. In her innocence she had rejoiced to find him unchanged." Richelieu also believed that Monsieur had not changed, and he was all the more anxious to get him out to his (Richelieu's) château at Rueil. He pretended that there was to be a fête at the château. Monsieur did not leave Rueil until he had opened his heart to the Cardinal, just as he had done in regard to the affair Chalais.

      Turned, and re-turned, by his terrible cousin, the unhappy wretch denounced mother and friends, – absent or present, – those who had plotted to overthrow the prime ministry and those who had (according to Gaston's story) tried to assassinate the Cardinal on such a day and in such a place. "Not," said Richelieu in his Mémoires, – "not that Monsieur recounted these things of his own accord. He did not do that; but the Cardinal asked him if it was not true that such a person had said such and such things, and he confessed, very ingenuously, that it was."

      Truly the fête at Rueil had sinister results for the friends of Monsieur.

      Monsieur СКАЧАТЬ