The years came and the years went, as had been their way since the fall
of Troy and earlier. To the philosophic eye, surveying existence with the
supreme wisdom of the initiate into mysteries, things changed but little
through eons on the surface of the world, where men loved and hated, bred
and slew, triumphed and failed, lorded and cringed as had been the way
since the beginning, when the cave man that handled the heavier
knuckle-bone ruled the roost. But to the unphilosophic eye of the
majority of mankind things seemed to change greatly in a very little
while; and it seemed, therefore, to the superficial, that many things had
happened in France and in Paris during the seventeen years that had
elapsed since the fight in the moat of Caylus.
To begin with, the great cardinal, the Red Man, the master of France, had
dipped from his dusk to his setting, and was inurned, with much pomp and
solemnity, as a great prince of the church should be, and the planet
wheeled on its indifferent way, though Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de
Richelieu, was no more. His Gracious Majesty Louis the Thirteenth,
self-named Louis the Just, found himself, for the first time in his
futile career, his own master, and did not know quite what to make of the
privilege. He mourned the deceased statesman with one eye, as it were,
while he ogled his belated goddess of freedom with the other. It might
well be that she had paid too tardy a visit, but at least he would essay
to trifle with her charms.
Many things had happened to the kingdom over which, for the first time,
his Majesty the King held undivided authority since the night of Caylus
fight. For one thing, by the cardinal's order, all the fortified castles
in France had been dismantled, and many of them reduced to ruins,
owl-haunted, lizard-haunted, ivy-curtained. This decree did not
especially affect Caylus, which had long ceased to be a possible menace
to the state, and, after the death of the grim old marquis, was rapidly
falling into decay on its own account without aid from the ministers of
Richelieu's will. For another thing, two very well-esteemed gentlemen of
his Majesty's Musketeers, having been provoked by two other very
well-esteemed gentlemen of his Eminence's Musketeers, had responded to
the challenge with the habitual alacrity of that distinguished body, and
had vindicated its superiority in swordcraft by despatching their
antagonists. After this victory the gentlemen of the Musketeers,
remembering the rigor of the cardinal's antipathy to duelling, made a
vain effort to put some distance between them and the king's justice.
They were arrested in their flight, brought back to Paris, and perished
miserably on the scaffold by the pointless sword of the executioner. Each
of these events proved in its degree that Monsieur de Richelieu had very
little respect for tradition, and that if he disliked an institution, no
matter how time-hallowed and admired by gentlemen, he did away with it in
the most uncompromising and arbitrary manner. There were many other
doings during the days of the cardinal's glory that are of no account in
this chronicle, though they were vastly of importance to the people of
France. But many things had happened that are of moment to this
chronicle, and these, therefore, shall be set down as briefly as may be.
News did not travel, when the seventeenth century was still young, from
one end of the kingdom to the other with any desperate rapidity. Even
when the posts rode at a hand gallop, the long leagues took their long
time to cover, and, after all, of most of the news that came to the
capital from abroad and afar it was generally safe to disbelieve a full
half, to discredit the third quarter, and to be justifiably sceptical as
to the remaining portion. But, credible or incredible, all news is blown
to Paris, as all roads lead to Rome, and in the fulness of time it got to
be known in Paris that the Duke Louis de Nevers, the young, the
beautiful, the brilliant, had come to his death in an extraordinary and
horrible manner hard by the Spanish frontier, having been, as it seemed,
deliberately butchered by a party of assassins employed, so it was said,
by his father-in-law, the old Count of Caylus.
It was not difficult for the well-informed in Paris to credit the ignoble
rumor. The old feud between the house of Caylus, on the one hand, and the
house of Nevers on the other, was familiar to those who made it their
business to be familiar with the movements of high persons in high
places; and when on the top of this inherited feud you had the secret
marriage between the son of the house of Nevers and the daughter of the
house of Caylus, there was every reason, at least, to believe in a bloody
end to the business. There was, however, no jot of definite proof against
the marquis. Nevers's dead body was found, indeed, in the neighborhood of
the castle, with three sword wounds on it, one inflicted from the back
and two from the front, but who inflicted or caused to be inflicted those
wounds it was impossible to assert with knowledge, though it was easy
enough to hazard a conjecture.
Anyway, Louis de Nevers was dead. It was amazing news enough for Paris,
but there was more amazing news to follow. To begin with, Louis de
Nevers's young wife was now formally recognized even by the old marquis
as Louis de Nevers's young widow. It was true that there was no
documentary evidence of the marriage, but Prince Louis de Gonzague, who
happened to be a guest of the Marquis de Caylus at the time of the
murder, and who seemed little less than inconsolable for the death of his
friend, came forward in the handsomest, gallantest fashion to give his
evidence. He told how he and his faithful henchman Peyrolles had been the
witnesses of the secret wedding. He succeeded in placating the wrath of
the Marquis of Caylus. He succeeded in obtaining the sanction of the
king, and, which was more important, the sanction of the cardinal, to the
recognition of the marriage of Mademoiselle de Caylus with the late Duke
Louis de Nevers. All this was thrilling news enough, but news more
thrilling was to follow. The newly recognized Duchess of Nevers soon, to
the astonishment and, at first, the blank incredulity of all hearers,
took to herself a third name, and became Madame la Princesse de Gonzague.
There was soon no doubt about it. She had consented to marry, and had
married, Prince Louis de Gonzague, who, as all the world knew, had been
the closest friend of the dead Louis of Nevers with one exception, and
that was Louis of Bourbon, that was King of France. People who talked of
such things said, and in this they were generally inspired in some way,
directly or indirectly, by friends of Prince Louis de Gonzague, that the
Duke de Nevers had been murdered by an exiled captain of Light-Horse, who
was little else than a professional bully, and who for some purpose or
purposes of his own had, at the same time, succeeded in stealing the
duke's infant daughter. What the reasons might be for this mysterious
act of kidnapping they either were not able or did not choose always to
explain. It was an undoubted fact that the late duke's daughter had
disappeared, for the grief of the whilom Duchess de Nevers and present
Princess de Gonzague was excessive for the loss of her child, and the
efforts she made and the money she spent in the hope of finding some
trace of her daughter were as useless as they were unavailing. It was
also certain that on or about the time of the late duke's death a certain
captain of Light-Horse, whose name some believed to be Henri de
Lagardere, had fled in hot haste from Paris to save his audacious head
from the outraged justice of the king for fighting a duel with a certain
truculent Baron de Brissac and incontinently killing his man.
What connection there might be between these two events those that busied
themselves in the matter left to the imagination and intelligence of
their hearers, but after awhile few continued to busy themselves in the
matter at all. Nevers was dead and forgotten. The fact that Nevers's
daughter had been stolen was soon forgotten likewise by all save the man
and the woman whom it most immediately concerned. Few troubled themselves
to remember that the Princess de Gonzague had been for a brief season the
Duchess de Nevers, and if Louis de Gonzague, whenever the tragic episode
was spoken of, expressed the deepest regret for his lost heart's brother
and the fiercest desire for vengeance upon his murderer or murderers,
the occasions on which the tragic episode was referred to grew less year
by year. Louis de Gonzague flourished; Louis de Gonzague lived in Paris
in great state; Louis de Gonzague was the intimate, almost the bosom
friend, of the king; for Louis of Bourbon, having lost one of the two
Louis whom he loved, seemed to have a double portion of affection to
bestow upon the survivor. If Louis de Gonzague did not himself forget any
of the events connected with a certain night in the moat of Caylus; if he
kept emissaries employed in researches in Spain, emissaries whose numbers
dwindled dismally and mysteriously enough in the course of those
researches, he spoke of his recollections to no one, save perhaps
occasionally to that distinguished individual, Monsieur Peyrolles, who
shared his master's confidences as he shared his master's rise in
fortunes. For Monsieur Peyrolles knew as well as his master all about
that night at Caylus seventeen years before, and could, if he chose--but
he never did choose--have told exactly how the Duke de Nevers came to his
death, and how the child of Nevers disappeared, and how it was that the
battered survivors of a little army of bravos had been overawed by the
muskets of a company of Free Companions. He could have told how seven
gentlemen that were named Staupitz, Faenza, Saldagno, Pepe, Pinto, Joel,
and Æsop had been sent to dwell and travel in Spain at the free charges
of Prince Louis de Gonzague, with the sole purpose of finding a man and a
child who so far had not been found, though it was now seventeen years
since the hounds had been sent a-hunting.
But though a year may seem long in running, it runs to its end, and
seventeen years, as any school-boy will prove to you, take only seventeen
times the length of one year to wheel into chaos. So these seventeen
years had been and had ceased to be, and it was again summer-time, when
many people travelled from many parts of the world for the pleasure of
visiting Paris, and some of those travellers happened to come from Spain.
X