Chapter 12 The Gamester by Rafael Sabatini
THE BED OF JUSTICE
Mr Law sought in the first instance the Abbé Dubois and put him in a rage as much by the news he brought as by the fact that the Abbé's own spies should have left him in ignorance of what was being plotted. Having exhausted profanity, his reverence applied his wits. "By whom were you warned?" he asked.
"Does it matter?"
"It matters that we should know if the thing is true."
"If I were not persuaded of that I should not be using back doors, and I should not be here now."
The ferrety little eyes peered sharply. The Abbé stroked his hollow cheeks. "No. I suppose not. No. And here, you are safe. But you can't remain indefinitely. Of course you don't wish to. No. But before you go again we must see that the Parliament is brought to order once for all. There's more in this, I tell you, than just your own case. Let me consider."
Not until a couple of hours later did Dubois send the Regent a prayer for audience, and conduct to him not only Mr Law, but also the Duke of Saint-Simon and the Chancellor d'Argenson, both of whom he had summoned to the Palais Royal by making free with the Regent's name.
His Highness had just dined, that is to say, he had just consumed the cup of chocolate that constituted his noontide meal, to be taken only when the main labours of the day had been performed. It happened that this afternoon Madame de Parabère kept him company in his study, whilst he sought relaxation in painting. Monsieur de Parabère had lately died, which Saint-Simon, in his charitable way, regarded as the most considerate thing he had ever done. His magnificent lady bore her widowhood with manifest resignation.
Three oranges on a green dish and a jug of blue Delft ware supplied the elements of the still-life composition that engaged His Highness. Perhaps because he was encountering difficulties he turned the less reluctantly from his easel to face his visitors.
"What is this, Abbé?" he grumbled. "Am I never to rest?"
Madame de Parabère stirred in her armchair.
"Perhaps," she suggested, "one of these gentlemen can tell you whether I am right about that shadow."
"It is not likely. Still, take a look, Messieurs." He waved his mahlstick towards the model. "Can any of you tell me what is the colour of the shadow cast by that vase?"
Mr Law took it upon himself to furnish another question by way of answer. "But is a shadow ever anything but black?"
The Regent shrugged and flung upwards a glance of hopeless invocation. "The ignorance of the clever!" he sighed.
"Just so," said Dubois. "The clever are clever because of their ignorance of things which it is not worth while to know. Monsieur Lass at the moment is concerned with shadows far deeper than any that your Highness can paint."
The Regent set his mahlstick across the pegs of his easel, thrust his brushes into a vase, laid down his palette, and slewed round to face them.
"So be it. Let us, then, talk of something that you understand. It is evident that you come with news; experience suggests that it is probably disagreeable. Ah me!"
It fell naturally to the lot of Mr Law, as the person chiefly concerned, to enlighten His Highness. It had the effect of darkening with weary disgust that florid countenance.
"Incredible," he said. "Outrageous! I should not believe it but for what happened two days ago. A messenger from de Mesmes waited upon me with a request for the suspension of the money edict, warning me that the Parliament would not disperse until it had my answer. I replied that nothing would please me better than that its members should sit until they rotted.
"Of course, Baron, Monsieur de Noailles has never forgiven you for losing him the presidency of the Council of Finance, whilst Monsieur de Horn brought me a complaint that you had robbed him of a fortune, and the Parliament dislikes you because it fears in our financial plans a threat to its authority. Even so, what you tell me lends them an incredible temerity. You'll have some evidence that they actually seek your life?"
"I have it from a trustworthy source, which I am not able to disclose."
"And they would really set my will at naught, would they, rescind my edicts and present me with a fait accompli of that magnitude?" Elbow on knee and chin in hand, the Regent sat forward, frowning. "Incredible!" he said again.
Madame de Parabère laughed. "Haven't you discovered that it is always the incredible that happens? Yet here it is not so incredible as you suppose. Your excessive good nature, Philippe, is the encouragement of those gentlemen."
"Ah!" He looked at her with crooked smile. "Little raven, you've been listening to Saint-Simon."
"No, no," the Duke protested. "Madame merely sees what is obvious to everyone but Your Highness." With the familiarity he had ever employed with the Regent since the days when they had been playmates, he now continued: "Your easy-going ways have robbed you of all authority with those mutineers, and where a frown of yours should suffice to quell them, you may now have to employ artillery."
"They're drunk with vanity and presumption," boomed d'Argenson. "They keep encroaching, and they grow by what they feed on."
Saint-Simon took up the tale. "They're conceiving themselves not a Parliament in our sense, but a Parliament in the English manner, which is a legislative assembly representing the entire nation."
"With powers," Mr Law reminded the Regent, "to bring even the King to account, as happened in the case of Charles the First."
"Peste! I don't think that is quite in the best taste," the Regent reproved him.
But the words were almost smothered by Saint-Simon in his haste to add: "They will justify themselves by representing what they do as done in the interests of France. Governing bodies are never more suspect than when they plausibly urge the interest of the people and act under the mask of public benefaction."
"It will need great firmness, monseigneur," said Dubois.
The Parabère laughed. "You'll have to supply him with it, Monsieur l'Abbé."
But His Highness was less amiable than usual. "Chut! Quiet!" he growled at her. "Jests are out of season." His face displayed weariness and irritation. "In God's name, what can I do? Summon the States-General?"
D'Argenson was prepared with advice. "A bed of justice will suffice, Highness." And he went on to remind them that the last one held to recall the Parliament to a sense of its duty had been attended by the late King, who came to it unceremoniously in a grey riding-suit, so as to mark his lack of respect for the assembly, and brandishing a riding-switch with which he had all the air of threatening its members. It was high time, thought d'Argenson, to renew a salutary impression which by now had worn off.
From this they came to a discussion of the details of that bed of justice which is a matter of history. You will remember the craftiness with which it was planned, so as to take the members entirely by surprise, even to the extent of not holding it at Versailles, but of bringing the King to the Tuileries.
By this expedient the Regent avoided giving the members notice until they were already in session in their own palace, leaving them no more than the time necessary to reach the royal presence. This last-moment summons constrained them--one hundred and fifty-three red-robed magistrates--to come on foot by streets that were lined with troops as an intimidating display of royal power.
There, in the Tuileries, two days after it had been planned in the Regent's study, in the presence of the enthroned royal child, mantled in ermine, sceptre in hand, supported by the princes of the blood, the bastards and the peers, d'Argenson, as Chancellor and mouthpiece of the King, scarcely concealed the satisfaction with which, in his own phrase, he set about washing the heads of those too-daring gentlemen of the robe.
His voice resonant, his tone harshly denunciatory, he began by reminding them that they were a judicial and not a legislative body, and that to assume the functions of the latter amounted to a usurpation involving the severest penalties. He based his definition upon citations by Kings Francis I and Charles IX, unequivocally confirmed by the late King Louis XIV whom they would remember as having come before them without any sort of ceremony, and with an unpleasant grin he let fall a reminder of the existence of the Bastille.
Next he announced to them that the decree by which they had presumed to repeal the royal edict for the banking of revenue had been quashed by the Council of Regency, and that any attempt to publish their decree would amount to a breach of the law and be attended by condign punishment.
The King, he thundered, required them to cease from abusing the right of remonstrance graciously restored to them by the Regent. Unless they preferred to be again deprived of it, let them keep within the limits of that which concerned their functions; let them confine themselves to processes of law between His Majesty's subjects, and not again intrude, as they had lately presumed to do, upon affairs of State.
He ended on the minatory assurance that lack of compliance would be attended by the severest pains and penalties to each one of them, and that in the event of any repetition of their offence they could not hope to be treated with the leniency which His Majesty graciously and clemently showed them on this occasion.
They might scowl and writhe under the fierce contemptuous rasp of d'Argenson's tongue, under his covert threat of the Bastille for some of them, under the undisguised and sneering smiles of the peers, but their courage broke and withered, and they bowed their heads in sullen obedience.
The Chancellor had entered into no details of the offence contemplated against Mr Law, nor had the Scot's name been so much as mentioned. Nevertheless, the gentlemen of the Parliament perfectly understood that it was their sinister project concerning him which had brought upon them the humiliation of that bed of justice.
If, understanding, they hated Law the more, yet at the same time they came to fear him as they had never feared him until now. They assumed that in some way, forewarned of what was plotting, he had exercised upon the Regent an influence great enough to have produced their shameful discomfiture.
Apprehensive of yet worse to follow, they sent their Vice-President Blamont to offer Mr Law their excuses that, misguided by prejudiced counsellors, they should have contemplated a course the error of which they now perceived with profound regret.
To Monsieur de Blamont they joined the old Maréchal de Villeroy, who had been in the plot because he resented the government of French finances by any foreigner, and the Duke of Aumont, who had been working in the interest of the Maines. In addition to offering the Parliament's apologies, they came to beg Mr Law to employ his good offices so as to bring about their reconciliation with the Regent.
Mr Law, who had now tranquilly returned to the Hôtel de Nevers after two nights spent in Dubois' quarters at the Palais Royal, chilled that deputation by his frosty urbanity. In tones that expressed the very opposite he professed to value their representations and assured them that he would do their errand to the Regent. Thus he dismissed them, without, however, quite removing from them the haunting fear of the Bastille.
Actually the moment chosen to approach him could hardly have been less favourable. He had returned home a few hours earlier to be confronted with an indignant Catherine, who desired peremptorily to know where he had spent the last two nights. His answer had been short and simple: "At the Palais Royal."
Her lip had curled in sarcastic unbelief. "And the Countess of Horn? Was she there, too?"
Of the resentment provoked by her constant and groundless suspicions his cold exterior had never given sign; nor did he give it now, when the resentment she aroused was deeper and more bitter than it had ever been.
"If I thought that you ask for information I should supply it. But for questions that are mere ill-natured rhetoric I have no answers."
"Indeed! And her ladyship's visit to you here? What sort of rhetoric was that?"
"She brought me information of the first importance."
"A woman you pretended not to know?"
"It was no pretence."
"Indeed, a shorter word describes it better. It was just a lie."
He sighed. "I wonder if the delight of others in your womanhood has ever equalled my frequent regrets that you are not a man."
"Delight in my womanhood! What do you mean?" Indignation crimsoned her from neck to brow. "Whom do you mean? Whom have you in mind?"
"I seem to remember that there has already been mention between us of the Count of Horn."
"The Count of Horn? You know that the Count has had of me no more than my fingertips." The lovely, delicately featured face was mottled and disfigured by anger. She stamped her foot. "You are creating a diversion, to draw me away from your...your wickedness, your falsity, your relations with this woman, whom you say you did not know, yet who called you John and carried you off in her coach, slyly, when you slunk out to join her at the back entrance. Perhaps you thought I didn't know. Whither did she carry you? Dare you tell me? Or would you prefer to tell the Count of Horn?"
"I have already told you. To the Palais Royal."
"You laugh! God a' mercy! You want to serve me tit-for-tat. I think I begin to understand you."
"If only I could return the compliment."
"Or perhaps," she raged on, without heeding him, "you actually find that carroty-headed woman to your taste. Go your ways, then. I shall know what to do. I claim a like liberty."
For a moment he was tempted to tell her what, owing to a laudable reticence in the Countess of Horn, she had not yet discovered, that this lady was that Margaret Ogilvy for whose sake he had killed Beau Wilson.
But he realized in time that the knowledge, far from producing a surcease of her jealous frenzy, would supply it with additional fuel, and might drive her to incalculable lengths. So he held his tongue and left her to the wild surmisings of his infidelity, which his icy demeanour made her ever, and, as Will would have told him, not unnaturally, prone.
It may have been fortunate for him that in those days there was much else to engage his mind and so provide not only relief from his unhappy domestic circumstances, but a balm for old wounds, an anodyne to the pain aroused in him by that renewed if fleeting contact with Margaret Ogilvy.