wrinkle in her gown, turning sideways to see if its folds fell properly,
and as she did so, she caught sight of the king on the couch behind her.
The carpet had so muffled the sound of his steps that he had slipped in
softly without being heard.
“You frightened me!” she said, with a cry of surprise, which was quickly
repressed.
“Were you thinking of me?” said the king.
“When do I not think of you?” she answered, sitting down beside him.
She took off his cap and cloak, passing her hands through his hair
as though she combed it with her fingers. Charles let her do as she
pleased, but made no answer. Surprised at this, Marie knelt down to
study the pale face of her royal master, and then saw the signs of a
dreadful weariness and a more consummate melancholy than any she had yet
consoled. She repressed her tears and kept silence, that she might
not irritate by mistaken words the sorrow which, as yet, she did not
understand. In this she did as tender women do under like circumstances.
She kissed that forehead, seamed with untimely wrinkles, and those
livid cheeks, trying to convey to the worn-out soul the freshness of
hers,--pouring her spirit into the sweet caresses which met with no
response. Presently she raised her head to the level of the king’s,
clasping him softly in her arms; then she lay still, her face hidden on
that suffering breast, watching for the opportune moment to question his
dejected mind.
“My Charlot,” she said at last, “will you not tell your poor, distressed
Marie the troubles that cloud that precious brow, and whiten those
beautiful red lips?”
“Except Charlemagne,” he said in a hollow voice, “all the kings of
France named Charles have ended miserably.”
“Pooh!” she said, “look at Charles VIII.”
“That poor prince!” exclaimed the king. “In the flower of his age he
struck his head against a low door at the chateau of Amboise, which he
was having decorated, and died in horrible agony. It was his death which
gave the crown to our family.”
“Charles VII. reconquered his kingdom.”
“Darling, he died” (the king lowered his voice) “of hunger; for he
feared being poisoned by the dauphin, who had already caused the death
of his beautiful Agnes. The father feared his son; to-day the son dreads
his mother!”
“Why drag up the past?” she said hastily, remembering the dreadful life
of Charles VI.
“Ah! sweetest, kings have no need to go to sorcerers to discover
their coming fate; they need only turn to history. I am at this moment
endeavoring to escape the fate of Charles the Simple, who was robbed of
his crown, and died in prison after seven years’ captivity.”
“Charles V. conquered the English,” she cried triumphantly.
“No, not he, but du Guesclin. He himself, poisoned by Charles de
Navarre, dragged out a wretched existence.”
“Well, Charles IV., then?”
“He married three times to obtain an heir, in spite of the masculine
beauty of the children of Philippe le Bel. The first house of Valois
ended with him, and the second is about to end in the same way. The
queen has given me only a daughter, and I shall die without leaving
her pregnant; for a long minority would be the greatest curse I could
bequeath to the kingdom. Besides, if I had a son, would he live? The
name of Charles is fatal; Charlemagne exhausted the luck of it. If I
left a son I would tremble at the thought that he would be Charles X.”
“Who is it that wants to seize your crown?”
“My brother d’Alencon conspires against it. Enemies are all about me.”
“Monsieur,” said Marie, with a charming little pout, “do tell me
something gayer.”
“Ah! my little jewel, my treasure, don’t call me ‘monsieur,’ even in
jest; you remind me of my mother, who stabs me incessantly with that
title, by which she seems to snatch away my crown. She says ‘my son’ to
the Duc d’Anjou--I mean the king of Poland.”
“Sire,” exclaimed Marie, clasping her hands as though she were praying,
“there is a kingdom where you are worshipped. Your Majesty fills it with
his glory, his power; and there the word ‘monsieur,’ means ‘my beloved
lord.’”
She unclasped her hands, and with a pretty gesture pointed to her heart.
The words were so _musiques_ (to use a word of the times which depicted
the melodies of love) that Charles IX. caught her round the waist with
the nervous force that characterized him, and seated her on his knee,
rubbing his forehead gently against the pretty curls so coquettishly
arranged. Marie thought the moment favorable; she ventured a few kisses,
which Charles allowed rather than accepted, then she said softly:--
“If my servants were not mistaken you were out all night in the streets,
as in the days when you played the pranks of a younger son.”
“Yes,” replied the king, still lost in his own thoughts.
“Did you fight the watchman and frighten some of the burghers? Who are
the men you brought here and locked up? They must be very criminal, as
you won’t allow any communication with them. No girl was ever locked in
as carefully, and they have not had a mouthful to eat since they came.
The Germans whom Solern left to guard them won’t let any one go near the
room. Is it a joke you are playing; or is it something serious?”
“Yes, you are right,” said the king, coming out of his reverie, “last
night I did scour the roofs with Tavannes and the Gondis. I wanted to
try my old follies with the old companions; but my legs were not what
they once were; I did not dare leap the streets; though we did jump two
alleys from one roof to the next. At the second, however, Tavannes and
I, holding on to a chimney, agreed that we couldn’t do it again. If
either of us had been alone we couldn’t have done it then.”
“I’ll wager that you sprang first.” The king smiled. “I know why you
risk your life in that way.”
“And why, you little witch?”
“You are tired of life.”
“Ah, sorceress! But I am being hunted down by sorcery,” said the king,
resuming his anxious look.
“My sorcery is love,” she replied, smiling. “Since the happy day when
you first loved me, have I not always divined your thoughts? And--if you
will let me speak the truth--the thoughts which torture you to-day are
not worthy of a king.”
“Am I a king?” he said bitterly.
“Cannot you be one? What did Charles VII. do? He listened to his
mistress, monseigneur, and he reconquered his kingdom, invaded by the
English as yours is now by the enemies of our religion. Your last _coup
d’Etat_ showed you the course you have to follow. Exterminate heresy.”
“You blamed the Saint-Bartholomew,” said Charles, “and now you--”
“That is over,” she said; “besides, I agree with Madame Catherine that
it was better to do it yourselves than let the Guises do it.”
“Charles VII. had only men to fight; I am face to face with ideas,”
resumed the king. “We can kill men, but we can’t kill words! The Emperor
Charles V. gave up the attempt; his son Philip has spent his strength
upon it; we shall all perish, we kings, in that struggle. On whom can
I rely? To right, among the Catholics, I find the Guises, who are my
enemies; to left, the Calvinists, who will never forgive me the death of
my poor old Coligny, nor that bloody day in August; besides, they want
to suppress the throne; and in front of me what have I?--my mother!”
“Arrest her; reign alone,” said Marie in a low voice, whispering in his
ear.
“I meant to do so yesterday; to-day I no longer intend it. You speak of
it rather coolly.”
“Between the daughter of an apothecary and that of a doctor there is no
great difference,” replied Touchet, always ready to laugh at the false
origin attributed to her.
The king frowned.
“Marie, don’t take such liberties. Catherine de’ Medici is my mother,
and you ought to tremble lest--”
“What is it you fear?”
“Poison!” cried the king, beside himself.
“Poor child!” cried Marie, restraining her tears; for the sight of
such strength united to such weakness touched her deeply. “Ah!” she
continued, “you make me hate Madame Catherine, who has been so good to
me; her kindness now seems perfidy. Why is she so kind to me, and bad to
you? During my stay in Dauphine I heard many things about the beginning
of your reign which you concealed from me; it seems to me that the
queen, your mother, is the real cause of all your troubles.”
“In what way?” cried the king, deeply interested.
“Women whose souls and whose intentions are pure use virtue wherewith to
rule the men they love; but women who do not seek good rule men through
their evil instincts. Now, the queen made vices out of certain of
your noblest qualities, and she taught you to believe that your worst
inclinations were virtues. Was that the part of a mother? Be a tyrant
like Louis XI.; inspire terror; imitate Philip II.; banish the Italians;
drive out the Guises; confiscate the lands of the Calvinists. Out of
this solitude you will rise a king; you will save the throne. The moment
is propitious; your brother is in Poland.”
“We are two children at statecraft,” said Charles, bitterly; “we know
nothing except how to love. Alas! my treasure, yesterday I, too, thought
all these things; I dreamed of accomplishing great deeds--bah! my mother
blew down my house of cards! From a distance we see great questions
outlined like the summits of mountains, and it is easy to say: ‘I’ll
make an end of Calvinism; I’ll bring those Guises to task; I’ll separate
from the Court of Rome; I’ll rely upon my people, upon the burghers--’
ah! yes, from afar it all seems simple enough! but try to climb those
mountains and the higher you go the more the difficulties appear.
Calvinism, in itself, is the last thing the leaders of that party care
for; and the Guises, those rabid Catholics, would be sorry indeed to
see the Calvinists put down. Each side considers its own interests
exclusively, and religious opinions are but a cloak for insatiable
ambition. The party of Charles IX. is the feeblest of all. That of the
king of Navarre, that of the king of Poland, that of the Duc d’Alencon,
that of the Condes, that of the Guises, that of my mother, are all
intriguing one against another, but they take no account of me, not
even in my own council. My mother, in the midst of so many contending
elements, is, nevertheless, the strongest among them; she has just
proved to me the inanity of my plans. We are surrounded by rebellious
subjects who defy the law. The axe of Louis XI. of which you speak, is
lacking to us. Parliament would not condemn the Guises, nor the king of
Navarre, nor the Condes, nor my brother. No! the courage to assassinate
is needed; the throne will be forced to strike down those insolent men
who suppress both law and justice; but where can we find the faithful
arm? The council I held this morning has disgusted me with everything;
treason everywhere; contending interests all about me. I am tired with
the burden of my crown. I only want to die in peace.”
He dropped into a sort of gloomy somnolence.
“Disgusted with everything!” repeated Marie Touchet, sadly; but she did
not disturb the black torpor of her lover.
Charles was the victim of a complete prostration of mind and body,
produced by three things,--the exhaustion of all his faculties,
aggravated by the disheartenment of realizing the extent of an evil; the
recognized impossibility of surmounting his weakness; and the aspect of
difficulties so great that genius itself would dread them. The king’s
depression was in proportion to the courage and the loftiness of ideas
to which he had risen during the last few months. In addition to this,
an attack of nervous melancholy, caused by his malady, had seized him
as he left the protracted council which had taken place in his private
cabinet. Marie saw that he was in one of those crises when the least
word, even of love, would be importunate and painful; so she remained
kneeling quietly beside him, her head on his knee, the king’s hand
buried in her hair, and he himself motionless, without a word, without
a sigh, as still as Marie herself,--Charles IX. in the lethargy of
impotence, Marie in the stupor of despair which comes to a loving woman
when she perceives the boundaries at which love ends.
The lovers thus remained, in the deepest silence, during one of those
terrible hours when all reflection wounds, when the clouds of an inward
tempest veil even the memory of happiness. Marie believed that she
herself was partly the cause of this frightful dejection. She asked
herself, not without horror, if the excessive joys and the violent love
which she had never yet found strength to resist, did not contribute to
weaken the mind and body of the king. As she raised her eyes, bathed in
tears, toward her lover, she saw the slow tears rolling down his pallid
cheeks. This mark of the sympathy that united them so moved the king
that he rushed from his depression like a spurred horse. He took Marie
in his arms and placed her on the sofa.
“I will no longer be a king,” he cried. “I will be your lover, your
lover only, wholly given up to that happiness. I will die happy, and not
consumed by the cares and miseries of a throne.”
The tone of these words, the fire that shone in the half-extinct eyes of
the king, gave Marie a terrible shock instead of happiness; she blamed
her love as an accomplice in the malady of which the king was dying.
“Meanwhile you forget your prisoners,” she said, rising abruptly.
“Hey! what care I for them? I give them leave to kill me.”
“What! are they murderers?”
“Oh, don’t be frightened, little one; we hold them fast. Don’t think of
them, but of me. Do you love me?”
“Sire!” she cried.
“Sire!” he repeated, sparks darting from his eyes, so violent was the
rush of his anger at the untimely respect of his mistress. “You are in
league with my mother.”
“O God!” cried Marie, looking at the picture above her _prie-dieu_ and
turning toward it to say her prayer, “grant that he comprehend me!”
“Ah!” said the king suspiciously, “you have some wrong to me upon your
conscience!” Then looking at her from between his arms, he plunged his
eyes into hers. “I have heard some talk of the mad passion of a certain
Entragues,” he went on wildly. “Ever since their grandfather, the
soldier Balzac, married a viscontessa at Milan that family hold their
heads too high.”
Marie looked at the king with so proud an air that he was ashamed.
At that instant the cries of little Charles de Valois, who had just
awakened, were heard in the next room. Marie ran to the door.
“Come in, Bourguignonne!” she said, taking the child from its nurse and
carrying it to the king. “You are more of a child than he,” she cried,
half angry, half appeased.
“He is beautiful!” said Charles IX., taking his son in his arms.
“I alone know how like he is to you,” said Marie; “already he has your
smile and your gestures.”
“So tiny as that!” said the king, laughing at her.
“Oh, I know men don’t believe such things; but watch him, my Charlot,
play with him. Look there! See! Am I not right?”
“True!” exclaimed the king, astonished by a motion of the child which
seemed the very miniature of a gesture of his own.
“Ah, the pretty flower!” cried the mother. “Never shall he leave us!
_He_ will never cause me grief.”
The king frolicked with his son; he tossed him in his arms, and kissed
him passionately, talking the foolish, unmeaning talk, the pretty, baby
language invented by nurses and mothers. His voice grew child-like. At
last his forehead cleared, joy returned to his saddened face, and then,
as Marie saw that he had forgotten his troubles, she laid her head upon
his shoulder and whispered in his ear:--
“Won’t you tell me, Charlot, why you have made me keep murderers in
my house? Who are these men, and what do you mean to do with them? In
short, I want to know what you were doing on the roofs. I hope there was
no woman in the business?”
“Then you love me as much as ever!” cried the king, meeting the clear,
interrogatory glance that women know so well how to cast upon occasion.
“You doubted _me_,” she replied, as a tear shone on her beautiful
eyelashes.
“There are women in my adventure,” said the king; “but they are
sorceresses. How far had I told you?”
“You were on the roofs near by--what street was it?”
“Rue Saint-Honore, sweetest,” said the king, who seemed to have
recovered himself. Collecting this thoughts, he began to explain to his
mistress what had happened, as if to prepare her for a scene that was
presently to take place in her presence.
“As I was passing through the street last night on a frolic,” he said,
“I chanced to see a bright light from the dormer window of the house
occupied by Rene, my mother’s glover and perfumer, and once yours. I
have strong doubts about that man and what goes on in his house. If I am
poisoned, the drug will come from there.”
“I shall dismiss him to-morrow.”
“Ah! so you kept him after I had given him up?” cried the king. “I
thought my life was safe with you,” he added gloomily; “but no doubt
death is following me even here.”
“But, my dearest, I have only just returned from Dauphine with our
dauphin,” she said, smiling, “and Rene has supplied me with nothing
since the death of the Queen of Navarre. Go on; you climbed to the roof
of Rene’s house?”
IV. THE KING’S TALE
“Yes,” returned the king. “In a second I was there, followed by
Tavannes, and then we clambered to a spot where I could see without
being seen the interior of that devil’s kitchen, in which I beheld
extraordinary things which inspired me to take certain measures. Did
you ever notice the end of the roof of that cursed perfumer? The windows
toward the street are always closed and dark, except the last, from
which can be seen the hotel de Soissons and the observatory which my
mother built for that astrologer, Cosmo Ruggiero. Under the roof
are lodging-rooms and a gallery which have no windows except on the
courtyard, so that in order to see what was going on within, it was
necessary to go where no man before ever dreamed of climbing,--along the
coping of a high wall which adjoins the roof of Rene’s house. The
men who set up in that house the furnaces by which they distil
death, reckoned on the cowardice of Parisians to save them from being
overlooked; but they little thought of Charles de Valois! I crept along
the coping until I came to a window, against the casing of which I
was able to stand up straight with my arm round a carved monkey which
ornamented it.”
“What did you see, dear heart?” said Marie, trembling.
“A den, where works of darkness were being done,” replied the king. “The
first object on which my eyes lighted was a tall old man seated in a
chair, with a magnificent white beard, like that of old l’Hopital, and
dressed like him in a black velvet robe. On his broad forehead furrowed
deep with wrinkles, on his crown of white hair, on his calm, attentive
face, pale with toil and vigils, fell the concentrated rays of a lamp
from which shone a vivid light. His attention was divided between an old
manuscript, the parchment of which must have been centuries old, and two
lighted furnaces on which heretical compounds were cooking. Neither the
floor nor the ceiling of the laboratory could be seen, because of the
myriads of hanging skeletons, bodies of animals, dried plants, minerals,
and articles of all kinds that masked the walls; while on the floor were
books, instruments for distilling, chests filled with utensils for magic
and astrology; in one place I saw horoscopes and nativities, phials,
wax-figures under spells, and possibly poisons. Tavannes and I were
fascinated, I do assure you, by the sight of this devil’s-arsenal. Only
to see it puts one under a spell, and if I had not been King of France,
I might have been awed by it. ‘You can tremble for both of us,’ I
whispered to Tavannes. But Tavannes’ eyes were already caught by the
most mysterious feature of the scene. On a couch, near the old man, lay
a girl of strangest beauty,--slender and long like a snake, white as
ermine, livid as death, motionless as a statue. Perhaps it was a woman
just taken from her grave, on whom they were trying experiments, for she
seemed to wear a shroud; her eyes were fixed, and I could not see that
she breathed. The old fellow paid no attention to her. I looked at him
so intently that, after a while, his soul seemed to pass into mine. By
dint of studying him, I ended by admiring the glance of his eye,--so
keen, so profound, so bold, in spite of the chilling power of age. I
admired his mouth, mobile with thoughts emanating from a desire which
seemed to be the solitary desire of his soul, and was stamped upon every
line of the face. All things in that man expressed a hope which nothing
discouraged, and nothing could check. His attitude,--a quivering
immovability,--those outlines so free, carved by a single passion as
by the chisel of a sculptor, that IDEA concentrated on some experiment
criminal or scientific, that seeking Mind in quest of Nature, thwarted
by her, bending but never broken under the weight of its own audacity,
which it would not renounce, threatening creation with the fire it
derived from it,--ah! all that held me in a spell for the time being. I
saw before me an old man who was more of a king than I, for his glance
embraced the world and mastered it. I will forge swords no longer;
I will soar above the abysses of existence, like that man; for his
science, methinks, is true royalty! Yes, I believe in occult science.”
“You, the eldest son, the defender of the Holy Catholic, Apostolic, and
Roman Church?” said Marie.
“I.”
“What happened to you? Go on, go on; I will fear for you, and you will
have courage for me.”
“Looking at a clock, the old man rose,” continued the king. “He went
out, I don’t know where; but I heard the window on the side toward
the rue Saint-Honore open. Soon a brilliant light gleamed out upon the
darkness; then I saw in the observatory of the hotel de Soissons another
light replying to that of the old man, and by it I beheld the figure
of Cosmo Ruggiero on the tower. ‘See, they communicate!’ I said
to Tavannes, who from that moment thought the matter frightfully
suspicious, and agreed with me that we ought to seize the two men and
search, incontinently, their accursed workshop. But before proceeding
to do so, we wanted to see what was going to happen. After about
fifteen minutes the door opened, and Cosmo Ruggiero, my mother’s
counsellor,--the bottomless pit which holds the secrets of the court, he
from whom all women ask help against their husbands and lovers, and all
the men ask help against their unfaithful wives and mistresses, he who
traffics on the future as on the past, receiving pay with both
hands, who sells horoscopes and is supposed to know all things,--that
semi-devil came in, saying to the old man, ‘Good-day to you, brother.’
With him he brought a hideous old woman,--toothless, humpbacked,
twisted, bent, like a Chinese image, only worse. She was wrinkled as a
withered apple; her skin was saffron-colored; her chin bit her nose;
her mouth was a mere line scarcely visible; her eyes were like the black
spots on a dice; her forehead emitted bitterness; her hair escaped in
straggling gray locks from a dirty coif; she walked with a crutch; she
smelt of heresy and witchcraft. The sight of her actually frightened us,
Tavannes and me! We didn’t think her a natural woman. God never made a
woman so fearful as that. She sat down on a stool near the pretty snake
with whom Tavannes was in love. The two brothers paid no attention
to the old woman nor to the young woman, who together made a horrible
couple,--on the one side life in death, on the other death in life--”
“Ah! my sweet poet!” cried Marie, kissing the king.
“‘Good-day, Cosmo,’ replied the old alchemist. And they both looked into
the furnace. ‘What strength has the moon to-day?’ asked the elder. ‘But,
_caro Lorenzo_,’ replied my mother’s astrologer, ‘the September tides
are not yet over; we can learn nothing while that disorder lasts.’ ‘What
says the East to-night?’ ‘It discloses in the air a creative force which
returns to earth all that earth takes from it. The conclusion is that
all things here below are the product of a slow transformation, but that
all diversities are the forms of one and the same substance.’ ‘That is
what my predecessor thought,’ replied Lorenzo. ‘This morning Bernard
Palissy told me that metals were the result of compression, and that
fire, which divides all, also unites all; fire has the power to compress
as well as to separate. That man has genius.’ Though I was placed where
it was impossible for them to see me, Cosmo said, lifting the hand
of the dead girl: ‘Some one is near us! Who is it’ ‘The king,’ she
answered. I at once showed myself and rapped on the window. Ruggiero
opened it, and I sprang into that hellish kitchen, followed by Tavannes.
‘Yes, the king,’ I said to the two Florentines, who seemed terrified.
‘In spite of your furnaces and your books, your sciences and your
sorceries, you did not foresee my visit. I am very glad to meet the
famous Lorenzo Ruggiero, of whom my mother speaks mysteriously,’ I said,
addressing the old man, who rose and bowed. ‘You are in this kingdom
without my consent, my good man. For whom are you working here, you
whose ancestors from father to son have been devoted in heart to the
house of Medici? Listen to me! You dive into so many purses that by
this time, if you are grasping men, you have piled up gold. You are
too shrewd and cautious to cast yourselves imprudently into criminal
actions; but, nevertheless, you are not here in this kitchen without a
purpose. Yes, you have some secret scheme, you who are satisfied neither
by gold nor power. Whom do you serve,--God or the devil? What are you
concocting here? I choose to know the whole truth; I am a man who can
hear it and keep silence about your enterprise, however blamable it
maybe. Therefore you will tell me all, without reserve. If you deceive
me you will be treated severely. Pagans or Christians, Calvinists or
Mohammedans, you have my royal word that you shall leave the kingdom in
safety if you have any misdemeanors to relate. I shall leave you for
the rest of the night and the forenoon of to-morrow to examine your
thoughts; for you are now my prisoners, and you will at once follow me
to a place where you will be guarded carefully.’ Before obeying me
the two Italians consulted each other by a subtle glance; then Lorenzo
Ruggiero said I might be assured that no torture could wring their
secrets from them; that in spite of their apparent feebleness neither
pain nor human feelings had any power of them; confidence alone could
make their mouth say what their mind contained. I must not, he said, be
surprised if they treated as equals with a king who recognized God only
as above him, for their thoughts came from God alone. They therefore
claimed from me as much confidence and trust as they should give to me.
But before engaging themselves to answer me without reserve they must
request me to put my left hand into that of the young girl lying there,
and my right into that of the old woman. Not wishing them to think I was
afraid of their sorcery, I held out my hands; Lorenzo took the right,
Cosmo the left, and each placed a hand in that of each woman, so that I
was like Jesus Christ between the two thieves. During the time that the
two witches were examining my hands Cosmo held a mirror before me and
asked me to look into it; his brother, meanwhile, was talking with the
two women in a language unknown to me. Neither Tavannes nor I could
catch the meaning of a single sentence. Before bringing the men here we
put seals on all the outlets of the laboratory, which Tavannes undertook
to guard until such time as, by my express orders, Bernard Palissy, and
Chapelain, my physician, could be brought there to examine thoroughly
the drugs the place contained and which were evidently made there. In
order to keep the Ruggieri ignorant of this search, and to prevent them
from communicating with a single soul outside, I put the two devils in
your lower rooms in charge of Solern’s Germans, who are better than
the walls of a jail. Rene, the perfumer, is kept under guard in his own
house by Solern’s equerry, and so are the two witches. Now, my sweetest,
inasmuch as I hold the keys of the whole cabal,--the kings of Thune, the
chiefs of sorcery, the gypsy fortune-tellers, the masters of the future,
the heirs of all past soothsayers,--I intend by their means to read
_you_, to know your heart; and, together, we will find out what is to
happen to us.”
“I shall be glad if they can lay my heart bare before you,” said Marie,
without the slightest fear.
“I know why sorcerers don’t frighten you,--because you are a witch
yourself.”
“Will you have a peach?” she said, offering him some delicious fruit on
a gold plate. “See these grapes, these pears; I went to Vincennes myself
and gathered them for you.”
“Yes, I’ll eat them; there is no poison there except a philter from your
hands.”
“You ought to eat a great deal of fruit, Charles; it would cool your
blood, which you heat by such excitements.”
“Must I love you less?”
“Perhaps so,” she said. “If the things you love injure you--and I have
feared it--I shall find strength in my heart to refuse them. I adore
Charles more than I love the king; I want the man to live, released from
the tortures that make him grieve.”
“Royalty has ruined me.”
“Yes,” she replied. “If you were only a poor prince, like your
brother-in-law of Navarre, without a penny, possessing only a miserable
little kingdom in Spain where he never sets his foot, and Bearn in
France which doesn’t give him revenue enough to feed him, I should be
happy, much happier than if I were really Queen of France.”
“But you are more than the Queen of France. She has King Charles for the
sake of the kingdom only; royal marriages are only politics.”
Marie smiled and made a pretty little grimace as she said: “Yes, yes, I
know that, sire. And my sonnet, have you written it?”
“Dearest, verses are as difficult to write as treaties of peace; but you
shall have them soon. Ah, me! life is so easy here, I wish I might never
leave you. However, we must send for those Italians and question them.
_Tete-Dieu_! I thought one Ruggiero in the kingdom was one too many, but
it seems there are two. Now listen, my precious; you don’t lack sense,
you would make an excellent lieutenant of police, for you can penetrate
things--”
“But, sire, we women suppose all we fear, and we turn what is probable
into truths; that is the whole of our art in a nutshell.”
“Well, help me to sound these men. Just now all my plans depend on the
result of their examination. Are they innocent? Are they guilty? My
mother is behind them.”
“I hear Jacob’s voice in the next room,” said Marie.
Jacob was the favorite valet of the king, and the one who accompanied
him on all his private excursions. He now came to ask if it was the
king’s good pleasure to speak to the two prisoners. The king made a sign
in the affirmative, and the mistress of the house gave her orders.
“Jacob,” she said, “clear the house of everybody, except the nurse and
Monsieur le Dauphin d’Auvergne, who may remain. As for you, stay in
the lower hall; but first, close the windows, draw the curtains of the
salon, and light the candles.”
The king’s impatience was so great that while these preparations were
being made he sat down upon a raised seat at the corner of a lofty
fireplace of white marble in which a bright fire was blazing, placing
his pretty mistress by his side. His portrait, framed in velvet, was
over the mantle in place of a mirror. Charles IX. rested his elbow on
the arm of the seat as if to watch the two Florentines the better under
cover of his hand.
The shutters closed, and the curtains drawn, Jacob lighted the wax
tapers in a tall candelabrum of chiselled silver, which he placed on the
table where the Florentines were to stand,--an object, by the bye, which
they would readily recognize as the work of their compatriot, Benvenuto
Cellini. The richness of the room, decorated in the taste of Charles
IX., now shone forth. The red-brown of the tapestries showed to
better advantage than by daylight. The various articles of furniture,
delicately made or carved, reflected in their ebony panels the glow of
the fire and the sparkle of the lights. Gilding, soberly applied, shone
here and there like eyes, brightening the brown color which prevailed in
this nest of love.
Jacob presently gave two knocks, and, receiving permission, ushered in
the Italians. Marie Touchet was instantly affected by the grandeur of
Lorenzo’s presence, which struck all those who met him, great and small
alike. The silvery whiteness of the old man’s beard was heightened by a
robe of black velvet; his brow was like a marble dome. His austere face,
illumined by two black eyes which cast a pointed flame, conveyed an
impression of genius issuing from solitude, and all the more effective
because its power had not been dulled by contact with men. It was like
the steel of a blade that had never been fleshed.
As for Cosmo Ruggiero, he wore the dress of a courtier of the time.
Marie made a sign to the king to assure him that he had not exaggerated
his description, and to thank him for having shown her these
extraordinary men.
“I would like to have seen the sorceresses, too,” she whispered in his
ear.
V. THE ALCHEMISTS
Again absorbed in thought, Charles IX. made her no answer; he was idly
flicking crumbs of bread from his doublet and breeches.
“Your science cannot change the heavens or make the sun to shine,
messieurs,” he said at last, pointing to the curtains which the gray
atmosphere of Paris darkened.
“Our science can make the skies what we like, sire,” replied Lorenzo
Ruggiero. “The weather is always fine for those who work in a laboratory
by the light of a furnace.”
“That is true,” said the king. “Well, father,” he added, using an
expression familiar to him when addressing old men, “explain to us
clearly the object of your studies.”
“What will guarantee our safety?”
“The word of a king,” replied Charles IX., whose curiosity was keenly
excited by the question.
Lorenzo Ruggiero seemed to hesitate, and Charles IX. cried out: “What
hinders you? We are here alone.”
“But is the King of France here?” asked Lorenzo.
Charles reflected an instant, and then answered, “No.”
The imposing old man then took a chair, and seated himself. Cosmo,
astonished at this boldness, dared not imitate it.
Charles IX. remarked, with cutting sarcasm: “The king is not here,
monsieur, but a lady is, whose permission it was your duty to await.”
“He whom you see before you, madame,” said the old man, “is as far above
kings as kings are above their subjects; you will think me courteous
when you know my powers.”
Hearing these audacious words, with Italian emphasis, Charles and Marie
looked at each other, and also at Cosmo, who, with his eyes fixed on his
brother, seemed to be asking himself: “How does he intend to get us out
of the danger in which we are?”
In fact, there was but one person present who could understand the
boldness and the art of Lorenzo Ruggiero’s first step; and that person
was neither the king nor his young mistress, on whom that great seer
had already flung the spell of his audacity,--it was Cosmo Ruggiero,
his wily brother. Though superior himself to the ablest men at court,
perhaps even to Catherine de’ Medici herself, the astrologer always
recognized his brother Lorenzo as his master.
Buried in studious solitude, the old savant weighed and estimated
sovereigns, most of whom were worn out by the perpetual turmoil of
politics, the crises of which at this period came so suddenly and
were so keen, so intense, so unexpected. He knew their ennui, their
lassitude, their disgust with things about them; he knew the ardor with
which they sought what seemed to them new or strange or fantastic; above
all, how they loved to enter some unknown intellectual region to escape
their endless struggle with men and events. To those who have exhausted
statecraft, nothing remains but the realm of pure thought. Charles the
Fifth proved this by his abdication. Charles IX., who wrote sonnets and
forged blades to escape the exhausting cares of an age in which both
throne and king were threatened, to whom royalty had brought only cares
and never pleasures, was likely to be roused to a high pitch of interest
by the bold denial of his power thus uttered by Lorenzo. Religious
doubt was not surprising in an age when Catholicism was so violently
arraigned; but the upsetting of all religion, given as the basis of a
strange, mysterious art, would surely strike the king’s mind, and drag
it from its present preoccupations. The essential thing for the two
brothers was to make the king forget his suspicions by turning his mind
to new ideas.
The Ruggieri were well aware that their stake in this game was their own
life, and the glances, so humble, and yet so proud, which they exchanged
with the searching, suspicious eyes of Marie and the king, were a scene
in themselves.
“Sire,” said Lorenzo Ruggiero, “you have asked me for the truth; but, to
show the truth in all her nakedness, I must also show you and make
you sound the depths of the well from which she comes. I appeal to
the gentleman and the poet to pardon words which the eldest son of the
Church might take for blasphemy,--I believe that God does not concern
himself with human affairs.”
Though determined to maintain a kingly composure, Charles IX. could not
repress a motion of surprise.
“Without that conviction I should have no faith whatever in the
miraculous work to which my life is devoted. To do that work I must have
this belief; and if the finger of God guides all things, then--I am a
madman. Therefore, let the king understand, once for all, that this work
means a victory to be won over the present course of Nature. I am an
alchemist, sire. But do not think, as the common-minded do, that I seek
to make gold. The making of gold is not the object but an incident of
our researches; otherwise our toil could not be called the GREAT WORK.
The Great Work is something far loftier than that. If, therefore, I were
forced to admit the presence of God in matter, my voice must logically
command the extinction of furnaces kept burning throughout the ages. But
to deny the direct action of God in the world is not to deny God; do not
make that mistake. We place the Creator of all things far higher than
the sphere to which religions have degraded Him. Do not accuse of
atheism those who look for immortality. Like Lucifer, we are jealous of
our God; and jealousy means love. Though the doctrine of which I speak
is the basis of our work, all our disciples are not imbued with it.
Cosmo,” said the old man, pointing to his brother, “Cosmo is devout; he
pays for masses for the repose of our father’s soul, and he goes to hear
them. Your mother’s astrologer believes in the divinity of Christ, in
the Immaculate Conception, in Transubstantiation; he believes also in
the Pope’s indulgences and in hell, and in a multitude of such things.
His hour has not yet come. I have drawn his horoscope; he will live to
be almost a centenarian; he will live through two more reigns, and he
will see two kings of France assassinated.”
“Who are they?” asked the king.
“The last of the Valois and the first of the Bourbons,” replied Lorenzo.
“But Cosmo shares my opinion. It is impossible to be an alchemist and a
Catholic, to have faith in the despotism of man over matter, and also in
the sovereignty of the divine.”
“Cosmo to die a centenarian!” exclaimed the king, with his terrible
frown of the eyebrows.
“Yes, sire,” replied Lorenzo, with authority; “and he will die peaceably
in his bed.”
“If you have power to foresee the moment of your death, why are you
ignorant of the outcome of your researches?” asked the king.
Charles IX. smiled as he said this, looking triumphantly at Marie
Touchet. The brothers exchanged a rapid glance of satisfaction.
“He begins to be interested,” thought they. “We are saved!”
“Our prognostics depend on the immediate relations which exist at the
time between man and Nature; but our purpose itself is to change those
relations entirely,” replied Lorenzo.
The king was thoughtful.
“But, if you are certain of dying you are certain of defeat,” he said,
at last.
“Like our predecessors,” replied Lorenzo, raising his hand and letting
it fall again with an emphatic and solemn gesture, which presented
visibly the grandeur of his thought. “But your mind has bounded to the
confines of the matter, sire; we must return upon our steps. If you do
not know the ground on which our edifice is built, you may well think
it doomed to crumble with our lives, and so judge the Science cultivated
from century to century by the greatest among men, as the common herd
judge of it.”
The king made a sign of assent.
“I think,” continued Lorenzo, “that this earth belongs to man; he is
the master of it, and he can appropriate to his use all forces and all
substances. Man is not a creation issuing directly from the hand of God;
but the development of a principle sown broadcast into the infinite of
ether, from which millions of creatures are produced,--differing beings
in different worlds, because the conditions surrounding life are varied.
Yes, sire, the subtle element which we call _life_ takes its rise beyond
the visible worlds; creation divides that principle according to the
centres into which it flows; and all beings, even the lowest, share it,
taking so much as they can take of it at their own risk and peril. It is
for them to protect themselves from death,--the whole purpose of alchemy
lies there, sire. If man, the most perfect animal on this globe, bore
within himself a portion of the divine, he would not die; but he does
die. To solve this difficulty, Socrates and his school invented the
Soul. I, the successor of so many great and unknown kings, the rulers of
this science, I stand for the ancient theories, not the new. I believe
in the transformations of matter which I see, and not in the possible
eternity of a soul which I do not see. I do not recognize that world
of the soul. If such a world existed, the substances whose magnificent
conjunction produced your body, and are so dazzling in that of Madame,
would not resolve themselves after your death each into its own element,
water to water, fire to fire, metal to metal, just as the elements of my
coal, when burned, return to their primitive molecules. If you believe
that a certain part of us survives, _we_ do not survive; for all that
makes our actual being perishes. Now, it is this actual being that I
am striving to continue beyond the limit assigned to life; it is our
present transformation to which I wish to give a greater duration.
Why! the trees live for centuries, but man lives only years, though
the former are passive, the others active; the first motionless and
speechless, the others gifted with language and motion. No created thing
should be superior in this world to man, either in power or in duration.
Already we are widening our perceptions, for we look into the stars;
therefore we ought to be able to lengthen the duration of our lives. I
place life before power. What good is power if life escapes us? A wise
man should have no other purpose than to seek, not whether he has some
other life within him, but the secret springs of his actual form, in
order that he may prolong its existence at his will. That is the
desire which has whitened my hair; but I walk boldly in the darkness,
marshalling to the search all those great intellects that share my
faith. Life will some day be ours,--ours to control.”
“Ah! but how?” cried the king, rising hastily.
“The first condition of our faith being that the earth belongs to man,
you must grant me that point,” said Lorenzo.
“So be it!” said Charles de Valois, already under the spell.
“Then, sire, if we take God out of this world, what remains? Man. Let
us therefore examine our domain. The material world is composed of
elements; these elements are themselves principles; these principles
resolve themselves into an ultimate principle, endowed with motion. The
number THREE is the formula of creation: Matter, Motion, Product.”
“Stop!” cried the king, “what proof is there of this?”
“Do you not see the effects?” replied Lorenzo. “We have tried in our
crucibles the acorn which produces the oak, and the embryo from which
grows a man; from this tiny substance results a single principle,
to which some force, some movement must be given. Since there is no
overruling creator, this principle must give to itself the outward forms
which constitute our world--for this phenomenon of life is the same
everywhere. Yes, for metals as for human beings, for plants as for
men, life begins in an imperceptible embryo which develops itself. A
primitive principle exists; let us seize it at the point where it begins
to act upon itself, where it is a unit, where it is a principle before
taking definite form, a cause before being an effect; we must see
it single, without form, susceptible of clothing itself with all the
outward forms we shall see it take. When we are face to face with this
atomic particle, when we shall have caught its movement at the very
instant of motion, _then_ we shall know the law; thenceforth we are the
masters of life, masters who can impose upon that principle the form we
choose,--with gold to win the world, and the power to make for ourselves
centuries of life in which to enjoy it! That is what my people and I
are seeking. All our strength, all our thoughts are strained in that
direction; nothing distracts us from it. One hour wasted on any other
passion is a theft committed against our true grandeur. Just as you have
never found your hounds relinquishing the hunted animal or failing to
be in at the death, so I have never seen one of my patient disciples
diverted from this great quest by the love of woman or a selfish
thought. If an adept seeks power and wealth, the desire is instigated by
our needs; he grasps treasure as a thirsty dog laps water while he swims
a stream, because his crucibles are in need of a diamond to melt or an
ingot of gold to reduce to powder. To each his own work. One seeks the
secret of vegetable nature; he watches the slow life of plants; he notes
the parity of motion among all the species, and the parity of their
nutrition; he finds everywhere the need of sun and air and water, to
fecundate and nourish them. Another scrutinizes the blood of animals.
A third studies the laws of universal motion and its connection with
celestial revolutions. Nearly all are eager to struggle with the
intractable nature of metal, for while we find many principles in other
things, we find all metals like unto themselves in every particular.
Hence a common error as to our work. Behold these patient, indefatigable
athletes, ever vanquished, yet ever returning to the combat! Humanity,
sire, is behind us, as the huntsman is behind your hounds. She cries
to us: ‘Make haste! neglect nothing! sacrifice all, even a man, ye who
sacrifice yourselves! Hasten! hasten! Beat down the arms of DEATH,
mine enemy!’ Yes, sire, we are inspired by a hope which involves the
happiness of all coming generations. We have buried many men--and what
men!--dying of this Search. Setting foot in this career we cannot work
for ourselves; we may die without discovering the Secret; and our death
is that of those who do not believe in another life; it is this life
that we have sought, and failed to perpetuate. We are glorious martyrs;
we have the welfare of the race at heart; we have failed but we live
again in our successors. As we go through this existence we discover
secrets with which we endow the liberal and the mechanical arts. From
our furnaces gleam lights which illumine industrial enterprises, and
perfect them. Gunpowder issued from our alembics; nay, we have mastered
the lightning. In our persistent vigils lie political revolutions.”
“Can this be true?” cried the king, springing once more from his chair.
“Why not?” said the grand-master of the new Templars. “_Tradidit mundum
disputationibus_! God has given us the earth. Hear this once more: man
is master here below; matter is his; all forces, all means are at his
disposal. Who created us? Motion. What power maintains life in us?
Motion. Why cannot science seize the secret of that motion? Nothing
is lost here below; nothing escapes from our planet to go
elsewhere,--otherwise the stars would stumble over each other; the
waters of the deluge are still with us in their principle, and not
a drop is lost. Around us, above us, beneath us, are to be found the
elements from which have come innumerable hosts of men who have crowded
the earth before and since the deluge. What is the secret of our
struggle? To discover the force that disunites, and then, _then_
we shall discover that which binds. We are the product of a visible
manufacture. When the waters covered the globe men issued from them who
found the elements of their life in the crust of the earth, in the
air, and in the nourishment derived from them. Earth and air possess,
therefore, the principle of human transformations; those transformations
take place under our eyes, by means of that which is also under our
eyes. We are able, therefore, to discover that secret,--not limiting the
effort of the search to one man or to one age, but devoting humanity
in its duration to it. We are engaged, hand to hand, in a struggle with
Matter, into whose secret, I, the grand-master of our order, seek to
penetrate. Christophe Columbus gave a world to the King of Spain; I seek
an ever-living people for the King of France. Standing on the confines
which separate us from a knowledge of material things, a patient
observer of atoms, I destroy forms, I dissolve the bonds of
combinations; I imitate death that I may learn how to imitate life. I
strike incessantly at the door of creation, and I shall continue so to
strike until the day of my death. When I am dead the knocker will pass
into other hands equally persistent with those of the mighty men who
handed it to me. Fabulous and uncomprehended beings, like Prometheus,
Ixion, Adonis, Pan, and others, who have entered into the religious
beliefs of all countries and all ages, prove to the world that the hopes
we now embody were born with the human races. Chaldea, India, Persia,
Egypt, Greece, the Moors, have transmitted from one to another Magic,
the highest of all the occult sciences, which holds within it, as a
precious deposit the fruits of the studies of each generation. In it lay
the tie that bound the grand and majestic institution of the Templars.
Sire, when one of your predecessors burned the Templars, he burned men
only,--their Secret lived. The reconstruction of the Temple is a vow of
an unknown nation, a race of daring seekers, whose faces are turned to
the Orient of _life_,--all brothers, all inseparable, all united by one
idea, and stamped with the mark of toil. I am the sovereign leader of
that people, sovereign by election, not by birth. I guide them onward
to a knowledge of the essence of life. Grand-master, Red-Cross-bearers,
companions, adepts, we forever follow the imperceptible molecule which
still escapes our eyes. But soon we shall make ourselves eyes more
powerful than those which Nature has given us; we shall attain to a
sight of the primitive atom, the corpuscular element so persistently
sought by the wise and learned of all ages who have preceded us in the
glorious search. Sire, when a man is astride of that abyss, when he
commands bold divers like my disciples, all other human interests are
as nothing. Therefore we are not dangerous. Religious disputes and
political struggles are far away from us; we have passed beyond and
above them. No man takes others by the throat when his whole strength
is given to a struggle with Nature. Besides, in our science results are
perceivable; we can measure effects and predict them; whereas all things
are uncertain and vacillating in the struggles of men and their selfish
interests. We decompose the diamond in our crucibles, and we shall make
diamonds, we shall make gold! We shall impel vessels (as they have at
Barcelona) with fire and a little water! We test the wind, and we shall
make wind; we shall make light; we shall renew the face of empires with
new industries! But we shall never debase ourselves to mount a throne to
be crucified by the peoples!”
In spite of his strong determination not to be taken in by Italian
wiles, the king, together with his gentle mistress, was already caught
and snared by the ambiguous phrases and doublings of this pompous and
humbugging loquacity. The eyes of the two lovers showed how their minds
were dazzled by the mysterious riches of power thus displayed; they saw,
as it were, a series of subterranean caverns filled with gnomes at their
toil. The impatience of their curiosity put to flight all suspicion.
“But,” cried the king, “if this be so, you are great statesmen who can
enlighten us.”
“No, sire,” said Lorenzo, naively.
“Why not?” asked the king.
“Sire, it is not given to any man to foresee what will happen when
thousands of men are gathered together. We can tell what one man will
do, how long he will live, whether he will be happy or unhappy; but
we cannot tell what a collection of wills may do; and to calculate the
oscillations of their selfish interests is more difficult still, for
interests are men _plus_ things. We can, in solitude, see the future as
a whole, and that is all. The Protestantism that now torments you will
be destroyed in turn by its material consequences, which will turn to
theories in due time. Europe is at the present moment getting the better
of religion; to-morrow it will attack royalty.”
“Then the Saint-Bartholomew was a great conception?”
“Yes, sire; for if the people triumph it will have a Saint-Bartholomew
of its own. When religion and royalty are destroyed the people will
attack the nobles; after the nobles, the rich. When Europe has become
a mere troop of men without consistence or stability, because without
leaders, it will fall a prey to brutal conquerors. Twenty times already
has the world seen that sight, and Europe is now preparing to renew
it. Ideas consume the ages as passions consume men. When man is cured,
humanity may possibly cure itself. Science is the essence of humanity,
and we are its pontiffs; whoso concerns himself about the essence cares
little about the individual life.”
“To what have you attained, so far?” asked the king.
“We advance slowly; but we lose nothing that we have won.”
“Then you are the king of sorcerers?” retorted the king, piqued at being
of no account in the presence of this man.
The majestic grand-master of the Rosicrucians cast a look on Charles IX.
which withered him.
“You are the king of men,” he said; “I am the king of ideas. If we were
sorcerers, you would already have burned us. We have had our martyrs.”
“But by what means are you able to cast nativities?” persisted the king.
“How did you know that the man who came to your window last night was
King of France? What power authorized one of you to tell my mother the
fate of her three sons? Can you, grand-master of an art which claims
to mould the world, can you tell me what my mother is planning at this
moment?”
“Yes, sire.”
This answer was given before Cosmo could pull his brother’s robe to
enjoin silence.
“Do you know why my brother, the King of Poland, has returned?”
“Yes, sire.”
“Why?”
“To take your place.”
“Our most cruel enemies are our nearest in blood!” exclaimed the king,
violently, rising and walking about the room with hasty steps. “Kings
have neither brothers, nor sons, nor mothers. Coligny was right; my
murderers are not among the Huguenots, but in the Louvre. You are either
imposters or regicides!--Jacob, call Solern.”
“Sire,” said Marie Touchet, “the Ruggieri have your word as a gentleman.
You wanted to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; do not
complain of its bitterness.”
The king smiled, with an expression of bitter self-contempt; he thought
his material royalty petty in presence of the august intellectual
royalty of Lorenzo Ruggiero. Charles IX. knew that he could scarcely
govern France, but this grand-master of Rosicrucians ruled a submissive
and intelligent world.
“Answer me truthfully; I pledge my word as a gentleman that your answer,
in case it confesses dreadful crimes, shall be as if it were never
uttered,” resumed the king. “Do you deal with poisons?”
“To discover that which gives life, we must also have full knowledge of
that which kills.”
“Do you possess the secret of many poisons?”
“Yes, sire,--in theory, but not in practice. We understand all poisons,
but do not use them.”
“Has my mother asked you for any?” said the king, breathlessly.
“Sire,” replied Lorenzo, “Queen Catherine is too able a woman to employ
such means. She knows that the sovereign who poisons dies by poison.
The Borgias, also Bianca Capello, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, are noted
examples of the dangers of that miserable resource. All things are known
at courts; there can be no concealment. It may be possible to kill
a poor devil--and what is the good of that?--but to aim at great men
cannot be done secretly. Who shot Coligny? It could only be you, or the
queen-mother, or the Guises. Not a soul is doubtful of that. Believe me,
poison cannot be twice used with impunity in statecraft. Princes have
successors. As for other men, if, like Luther, they are sovereigns
through the power of ideas, their doctrines are not killed by killing
them. The queen is from Florence; she knows that poison should never
be used except as a weapon of personal revenge. My brother, who has not
been parted from her since her arrival in France, knows the grief that
Madame Diane caused your mother. But she never thought of poisoning her,
though she might easily have done so. What could your father have said?
Never had a woman a better right to do it; and she could have done it
with impunity; but Madame de Valentinois still lives.”
“But what of those waxen images?” asked the king.
“Sire,” said Cosmo, “these things are so absolutely harmless that
we lend ourselves to the practice to satisfy blind passions, just as
physicians give bread pills to imaginary invalids. A disappointed woman
fancies that by stabbing the heart of a wax-figure she has brought
misfortunes upon the head of the man who has been unfaithful to her.
What harm in that? Besides, it is our revenue.”
“The Pope sells indulgences,” said Lorenzo Ruggiero, smiling.
“Has my mother practised these spells with waxen images?”
“What good would such harmless means be to one who has the actual power
to do all things?”
“Has Queen Catherine the power to save you at this moment?” inquired the
king, in a threatening manner.
“Sire, we are not in any danger,” replied Lorenzo, tranquilly. “I knew
before I came into this house that I should leave it safely, just as
I know that the king will be evilly disposed to my brother Cosmo a few
weeks hence. My brother may run some danger then, but he will escape it.
If the king reigns by the sword, he also reigns by justice,” added the
old man, alluding to the famous motto on a medal struck for Charles IX.
“You know all, and you know that I shall die soon, which is very well,”
said the king, hiding his anger under nervous impatience; “but how will
my brother die,--he whom you say is to be Henri III.?”
“By a violent death.”
“And the Duc d’Alencon?”
“He will not reign.”
“Then Henri de Bourbon will be king of France?”
“Yes, sire.”
“How will he die?”
“By a violent death.”
“When I am dead what will become of madame?” asked the king, motioning
to Marie Touchet.
“Madame de Belleville will marry, sire.”
“You are imposters!” cried Marie Touchet. “Send them away, sire.”
“Dearest, the Ruggieri have my word as a gentleman,” replied the king,
smiling. “Will madame have children?” he continued.
“Yes, sire; and madame will live to be more than eighty years old.”
“Shall I order them to be hanged?” said the king to his mistress. “But
about my son, the Comte d’Auvergne?” he continued, going into the next
room to fetch the child.
“Why did you tell him I should marry?” said Marie to the two brothers,
the moment they were alone.
“Madame,” replied Lorenzo, with dignity, “the king bound us to tell the
truth, and we have told it.”
“_Is_ that true?” she exclaimed.
“As true as it is that the governor of the city of Orleans is madly in
love with you.”
“But I do not love him,” she cried.
“That is true, madame,” replied Lorenzo; “but your horoscope declares
that you will marry the man who is in love with you at the present
time.”
“Can you not lie a little for my sake?” she said smiling; “for if the
king believes your predictions--”
“Is it not also necessary that he should believe our innocence?”
interrupted Cosmo, with a wily glance at the young favorite. “The
precautions taken against us by the king have made us think during the
time we have spent in your charming jail that the occult sciences have
been traduced to him.”
“Do not feel uneasy,” replied Marie. “I know him; his suspicions are at
an end.”
“We are innocent,” said the grand-master of the Rosicrucians, proudly.
“So much the better for you,” said Marie, “for your laboratory, and your
retorts and phials are now being searched by order of the king.”
The brothers looked at each other smiling. Marie Touchet took that smile
for one of innocence, though it really signified: “Poor fools! can they
suppose that if we brew poisons, we do not hide them?”
“Where are the king’s searchers?”
“In Rene’s laboratory,” replied Marie.
Again the brothers glanced at each other with a look which said: “The
hotel de Soissons is inviolable.”
The king had so completely forgotten his suspicions that when, as he
took his boy in his arms, Jacob gave him a note from Chapelain, he
opened it with the certainty of finding in his physician’s report
that nothing had been discovered in the laboratory but what related
exclusively to alchemy.
“Will he live a happy man?” asked the king, presenting his son to the
two alchemists.
“That is a question which concerns Cosmo,” replied Lorenzo, signing his
brother.
Cosmo took the tiny hand of the child, and examined it carefully.
“Monsieur,” said Charles IX. to the old man, “if you find it necessary
to deny the existence of the soul in order to believe in the possibility
of your enterprise, will you explain to my why you should doubt what
your power does? Thought, which you seek to nullify, is the certainty,
the torch which lights your researches. Ha! ha! is not that the motion
of a spirit within you, while you deny such motion?” cried the king,
pleased with his argument, and looking triumphantly at his mistress.
“Thought,” replied Lorenzo Ruggiero, “is the exercise of an inward
sense; just as the faculty of seeing several objects and noticing their
size and color is an effect of sight. It has no connection with what
people choose to call another life. Thought is a faculty which ceases,
with the forces which produced it, when we cease to breathe.”
“You are logical,” said the king, surprised. “But alchemy must therefore
be an atheistical science.’
“A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing.
Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through
the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece
by Pythagoras, one of the demigods of humanity. His doctrine of
re-incarnation is the mathematics of materialism, the vital law of its
phases. To each of the different creations which form the terrestrial
creation belongs the power of retarding the movement which sweeps on the
rest.”
“Alchemy is the science of sciences!” cried Charles IX.,
enthusiastically. “I want to see you at work.”
“Whenever it pleases you, sire; you cannot be more interested than
Madame the Queen-mother.”
“Ah! so this is why she cares for you?” exclaimed the king.
“The house of Medici has secretly protected our Search for more than a
century.”
“Sire,” said Cosmo, “this child will live nearly a hundred years; he
will have trials; nevertheless, he will be happy and honored, because he
has in his veins the blood of the Valois.”
“I will go and see you in your laboratory, messieurs,” said the king,
his good-humor quite restored. “You may now go.”
The brothers bowed to Marie and to the king and then withdrew. They went
down the steps of the portico gravely, without looking or speaking to
each other; neither did they turn their faces to the windows as they
crossed the courtyard, feeling sure that the king’s eye watched them.
But as they passed sideways out of the gate into the street they looked
back and saw Charles IX. gazing after them from a window. When the
alchemist and the astrologer were safely in the rue de l’Autruche, they
cast their eyes before and behind them, to see if they were followed
or overheard; then they continued their way to the moat of the Louvre
without uttering a word. Once there, however, feeling themselves
securely alone, Lorenzo said to Cosmo, in the Tuscan Italian of that
day:--
“Affe d’Iddio! how we have fooled him!”
“Much good may it do him; let him make what he can of it!” said Cosmo.
“We have given him a helping hand,--whether the queen pays it back to us
or not.”
Some days after this scene, which struck the king’s mistress as forcibly
as it did the king, Marie suddenly exclaimed, in one of those moments
when the soul seems, as it were, disengaged from the body in the
plenitude of happiness:--
“Charles, I understand Lorenzo Ruggiero; but did you observe that Cosmo
said nothing?”
“True,” said the king, struck by that sudden light. “After all, there
was as much falsehood as truth in what they said. Those Italians are as
supple as the silk they weave.”
This suspicion explains the rancor which the king showed against Cosmo
when the trial of La Mole and Coconnas took place a few weeks later.
Finding him one of the agents of that conspiracy, he thought the
Italians had tricked him; for it was proved that his mother’s astrologer
was not exclusively concerned with stars, the powder of projection, and
the primitive atom. Lorenzo had by that time left the kingdom.
In spite of the incredulity which most persons show in these matters,
the events which followed the scene we have narrated confirmed the
predictions of the Ruggieri.
The king died within three months.
Charles de Gondi followed Charles IX. to the grave, as had been foretold
to him jestingly by his brother the Marechal de Retz, a friend of the
Ruggieri, who believed in their predictions.
Marie Touchet married Charles de Balzac, Marquis d’Entragues, the
governor of Orleans, by whom she had two daughters. The most celebrated
of these daughters, the half-sister of the Comte d’Auvergne, was the
mistress of Henri IV., and it was she who endeavored, at the time
of Biron’s conspiracy, to put her brother on the throne of France by
driving out the Bourbons.
The Comte d’Auvergne, who became the Duc d’Angouleme, lived into the
reign of Louis XIV. He coined money on his estates and altered the
inscriptions; but Louis XIV. let him do as he pleased, out of respect
for the blood of the Valois.
Cosmo Ruggiero lived till the middle of the reign of Louis XIII.; he
witnessed the fall of the house of the Medici in France, also that of
the Concini. History has taken pains to record that he died an atheist,
that is, a materialist.
The Marquise d’Entragues was over eighty when she died.
The famous Comte de Saint-Germain, who made so much noise under Louis
XIV., was a pupil of Lorenzo and Cosmo Ruggiero. This celebrated
alchemist lived to be one hundred and thirty years old,--an age which
some biographers give to Marion de Lorme. He must have heard from the
Ruggieri the various incidents of the Saint-Bartholomew and of the
reigns of the Valois kings, which he afterwards recounted in the first
person singular, as though he had played a part in them. The Comte de
Saint-Germain was the last of the alchemists who knew how to clearly
explain their science; but he left no writings. The cabalistic doctrine
presented in this Study is that taught by this mysterious personage.
And here, behold a strange thing! Three lives, that of the old man from
whom I have obtained these facts, that of the Comte de Saint-Germain,
and that of Cosmo Ruggiero, suffice to cover the whole of European
history from Francois I. to Napoleon! Only fifty such lives are needed
to reach back to the first known period of the world. “What are fifty
generations for the study of the mysteries of life?” said the Comte de
Saint-Germain.