This conversation naturally led Pompée to a word in praise of the soldiers of his own time, savage in fighting the enemy, as they had proved at the siege of Montauban and the Battle of Corbie,22 but mild and well-mannered towards their compatriots – all of them qualities, it had to be said, which, nowadays, soldiers did not pride themselves on.
The fact is that, without realizing it, Pompée had just avoided an immense danger: that of being press-ganged. As he was accustomed to walk along with shining eyes, his chest puffed out in a warlike manner and with the bearing of a Nimrod, he attracted Cauvignac’s attention from the start. But subsequent events had changed the captain’s mind. After all, he had received two hundred pistoles from Nanon to look after the Baron de Canolles; then there was the philosophical reflection that jealousy is the most magnificent of passions and one that you should make the most of when you come across it. So the dear brother had left Pompée alone and allowed Madame de Cambes to continue on her way to Bordeaux – actually, in Nanon’s view, Bordeaux was still very close to Canolles. She would have preferred the viscountess to be in Peru, or India, or Greenland.
On the other hand, when Nanon considered that from now on she had her dear Canolles to herself between four solid walls, and that excellent fortifications, very hard for the king’s men to breach, would also be keeping Madame de Cambes a prisoner, she felt herself swell with those infinite joys that only children and lovers can know on this earth.
We have seen how her dream was realized and how Canolles and Nanon met again on the Ile Saint-Georges.
So, Madame de Cambes, on her side, was travelling along, sad and anxious. Pompée was far from reassuring her, despite his boasting, and when, on the evening of the day that she left Jaulnay, she saw quite a large troop of horsemen approaching down a side road, she felt an acute sense of fear.
The riders were those same gentlemen who were returning from the famous burial of the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, an occasion that under the pretext of paying appropriate respects to his father had served the Prince de Marsillac23 as an excuse to bring together all the nobility from France and Picardy who hated Mazarin even more than they were devoted to the princes. But one odd thing struck Madame de Cambes – and, even more, Pompée – which was that among the horsemen, some had their arms in slings, others had legs hanging limply in the stirrups, wrapped round with splints, and several had bloody bandages around their foreheads. As a result, one had to look very closely at them to recognize, in these gentlemen who were so unkindly fitted out, the spruce and sprightly sportsmen who had hunted the deer in the park at Chantilly.
But fear has sharp eyes: under the bloody wrappings, Pompée and Madame de Cambes recognized a few faces that they knew.
‘Curses!’ said Pompée. ‘There’s a burial that went down a few very weird roads. Most of these gentlemen must have fallen off their horses: look how knocked about they are.’
‘That is just what I was looking at,’ said Madame de Cambes.
‘It reminds me of the return from Corbie,’ said Pompée, proudly. ‘Except that, on that occasion, I was not among the brave men who were returning, but among those who were brought back.’
‘But weren’t these gentlemen under the command of some officer?’ asked Claire, feeling somewhat anxious about an undertaking that appeared to have had such a bad outcome. ‘Don’t they have a leader? Has he been killed, if we can’t see him? Look!’
‘Madame,’ Pompée replied, sitting up proudly in his saddle. ‘Nothing is easier than to recognize a leader among the people whom he commands. In general, in a troop, the officer goes in the centre, with his under-officers, while in battle he goes behind or on the flank. Look in the different places I have indicated, and you can judge for yourself.’
‘I can’t see anything. But I think we are being followed: look behind us.’
‘Hum, hum!’ said Pompée, coughing, but without turning round in case he did, indeed, see someone. ‘No, Madame, there’s no one. But wait for the leader. Might it be that red plume? No… Or that gilded sword? No… The pied horse, next to Monsieur de Turenne’s? No… That’s odd. There is no danger, so the leader could very well show himself. It’s not like Corbie here.’
‘You’re wrong, Master Pompée,’ said a strident, mocking voice from behind the poor steward’s back, almost making him fall over backwards. ‘You’re wrong: it’s worse than Corbie.’
Claire swiftly turned round and saw, a couple of yards away from her, a horseman of modest height and dressed in an affectedly simple way, who was looking at her with bright little eyes, sunk like those of a fox. With his thick black hair, his slender, shifting lips, his bilious pallor and his woeful brow, the man aroused a feeling of melancholy in daylight, but after dark, he could well have inspired terror.
‘Prince de Marsillac!’ Claire exclaimed, quite overcome. ‘Oh, Monsieur! Welcome!’
‘Say, rather: Duke de La Rochefoucauld, Madame, because now that my father the duke is dead, I have inherited this name as the one against which the actions of my life will be recorded, for good or ill.’
‘You are returning?’ said Claire, hesitantly.
‘We are returning defeated, Madame.’
‘Defeated! Heavens above! You!’
‘I say that we are returning defeated, Madame, because I am not boastful by nature, and because I tell myself the truth as I tell it to others; otherwise, I might claim that we are returning as victors. But in reality, we were defeated, since our plan for Saumur failed. I arrived too late; we have lost this important place, which Jarzay had just ceded. From now on, assuming that the princess has Bordeaux, as she was promised that she would, the whole war is going to be concentrated in Guyenne.’
‘But, Monsieur,’ Claire asked. ‘If, as I understand it, the capitulation of Saumur took place without a blow being struck, what is the meaning of this spectacle, and why are all these gentlemen wounded in this way?’
‘Because we met some soldiers of the king,’ said the Duke de La Rochefoucauld with a kind of pride that he could not hide, despite his mastery over his emotions.
‘And you fought?’ Madame de Cambes asked urgently.
‘Why, yes, Madame.’
‘And so,’ she murmured, ‘the first French blood has already been spilled by Frenchmen. And it is you, Duke, who set the example.’
‘It was I, Madame.’
‘You, who are so calm and cold and wise!’
‘When an unjust cause is defended against me, sometimes in my passionate advocacy of reason, I become quite unreasonable.’
‘At least you are not wounded?’
‘No, this time I was luckier than at Les Lignes or Paris. I even thought then that I had received enough from civil war not to have any further account with it, but I was wrong. What can we do? Men always make their plans without considering passion, the only true architect of our lives, which rebuilds its edifice, except when it destroys it entirely.’
Madame de Cambes smiled: she recalled that Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld had said that, for the lovely eyes of Madame de Longueville, he had made war against kings and would make war against the gods.
The smile was not lost on the duke, who, not allowing the viscountess time to follow the smile with the thought that had inspired it, went on: ‘But you, Madame, let me compliment you, because you are a model of daring.’
‘How is that?’
‘Why, travelling alone like this, with a single servant, like a Clorinda or a Bradamante!24 Oh, by the way, I learned of the charming part you played in Chantilly. They assure me that you admirably deceived a poor devil of a royal officer… An easy victory, I suppose?’ the duke added, with that smile and that look, which, in him, meant so much.
‘What do you mean?’ Claire asked, with concern.
‘I say “easy”, because he was not competing with you on equal terms. However, one thing did strike me in the account I was given of this adventure.’
And the duke stared even more closely at the viscountes
s with his small, piercing eyes.
Madame de Cambes had no possibility of retreat, so she prepared to defend herself as strenuously as she could.
‘Tell me, Duke,’ she said, ‘what was the thing that struck you?’
‘It was your extreme skill, Madame, in playing this little comedy. Indeed, if I am to believe what one tells me, the officer had already seen your groom and yourself.’
These last words, although spoken with all the reserve of a tactful man, nonetheless made a profound impression on Madame de Cambes.
‘You are saying that he had already seen me, Monsieur?’
‘One moment, Madame. Let’s be clear: I am not the one who is saying it, but that still undefined character whom we call “one”, to the power of whose words kings are subject as are the meanest of their subjects.’
‘And where was I seen?’
‘One says that it was on the road from Libourne to Chantilly, in a village called Jaulnay; however, the interview was not long, the gentleman having received an order from Monsieur d’Epernon to leave at once for Mantes.’
‘But if the gentleman had seen me, Duke, how was it that he did not recognize me?’
‘Ah! The famous one whom I mentioned just now – and who has a reply for everything – says that the interview took place in the dark.’
The viscountess was quivering with emotion. ‘This time, Duke,’ she said, ‘I really don’t know what you are implying.’
‘In that case,’ the duke replied, with affected geniality, ‘I must have been misinformed, and then, after all, what is a momentary encounter? It’s true, Madame,’ he added, ingratiatingly, ‘that your figure and your face are such as to leave a deep impression even after a brief meeting.’
‘But it’s not possible anyway,’ said the viscountess, ‘since, as you said yourself, the interview took place in darkness.’
‘Quite right and very acute of you, Madame. So I was wrong – unless, of course, the young man had already noticed you before that interview, in which case, though, the adventure at Jaulnay would not be an encounter exactly…’
‘What would it be, then?’ Claire asked. ‘Beware of what you are saying, Duke.’
‘And so, as you see, I am leaving the matter. Our dear French language is so impoverished that I am looking in vain for a word to express my thought. It would be… an appuntamento, as the Italians say, or an assignation, as the English put it.’
‘But unless I am mistaken, Duke,’ said Claire, ‘those two words are translated into French as rendez-vous.’
‘Well, now, listen to me: I’m being ridiculous in two languages, and I have met someone who happens to know both of them! Forgive me, Madame: it seems that Italian and English really are as impoverished as French.’
Claire pressed her left hand to her heart, so that she could breathe more easily: she was suffocating. Something occurred to her that she had always suspected, which was that Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld had, at least in thought and in desire, been unfaithful to Madame de Longueville with her and that if he was speaking in that way he was driven by a feeling of jealousy. Indeed, two years earlier, the Prince de Marsillac had courted Claire as assiduously as was possible for this cunning man, with the constant doubts and endless timidity that made him the most implacable of enemies when he was not the most grateful of friends. So the viscountess preferred not to quarrel openly with a man who combined public affairs with the most private considerations in this way.
‘Do you know, Duke,’ she said, ‘that you are a precious asset, above all in our present circumstances, when Mazarin, despite the pride he has in his spies, has less effective intelligence than yours?’
‘If I knew nothing, Madame,’ the Duke de La Rochefoucauld replied, ‘I should be only too like that dear minister, and then I should have no reason to make war on him. Consequently, I try to keep informed of almost everything.’
‘Even the secrets of your allies – should they have any?’
‘You have just said something that could be taken very badly were one to interpret it as “a woman’s secret”. So were that journey and that meeting a secret, then?’
‘Let us be quite clear, Duke, because you are only half right. The meeting was an accident. The journey was a secret, and even a women’s secret, because it was indeed known only to me and the princess.’
The duke smiled. This good defence sharpened his perspicacity.
‘And to Lenet,’ he said. ‘And to Richon and Madame de Tourville, and even to a certain Viscount de Cambes, who is unknown to me and whose name I heard mentioned for the first time on this occasion… It’s true that, since he is your brother, you will say that this means that the secret did not go outside the family.’
Claire began to laugh, to avoid irritating the duke, whose eyebrow she could already see starting to twitch.
‘Do you know one thing?’ she asked.
‘No, but tell me, and if it is a secret, I promise you, Madame, that I shall be as discreet as you and tell only my general staff.’
‘Well, do so, I ask nothing better, even though I risk making an enemy of a great princess whose hatred it is not a good idea to incur.’
The duke blushed imperceptibly.
‘So what is this secret?’ he asked.
‘In this journey that they got me to undertake, do you know who was the companion that the princess intended for me?’
‘No.’
‘It was you.’
‘Ah, yes, I remember the princess getting someone to ask me if I could serve as escort to a person who was returning from Libourne to Paris.’
‘And you refused.’
‘I was unavoidably detained in Poitou.’
‘Yes, you had to receive some dispatches from Madame de Longueville.’
La Rochefoucauld looked keenly at the viscountess, as if raking the depths of her heart, before the trace of her words had vanished and, coming closer to her, said: ‘Are you reproaching me for that?’
‘Not at all, Duke, your heart is so well placed in that respect that you are entitled to compliments rather than reproaches.’
‘Ah!’ he sighed, in spite of himself. ‘Would to heaven that I had made the journey with you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because I should not have gone to Saumur,’ he said, in a tone of voice that implied he had another reply ready, but either did not dare or did not wish to make it.
Claire thought: ‘Richon must be the one who told him everything.’
‘But in any event,’ the duke continued, ‘I am not complaining about my private misfortune since it was to the general good.’
‘What are you saying, Duke? I don’t understand.’
‘I mean that if I had been with you, you would not have met this officer, who, as it turned out – so well does heaven protect our cause – was the same that Mazarin sent to Chantilly.’
‘Oh, Duke! Don’t joke about that unfortunate officer,’ said Claire, her voice choking with the memory of a recent event.
‘Why not? Is he some sacred figure?’
‘Yes, he is now, because great misfortunes consecrate noble hearts as much as great good fortune. That officer may now be dead, having paid with his life for his mistake or his loyalty.’
‘Dead for love?’ asked the duke.
‘Please be serious, Monsieur. You know very well that if I were to give my heart to anyone, it would not be to a chance acquaintance on the highway. I am telling you that the unfortunate man was arrested this very day on the order of Monsieur de Mazarin.’
‘Arrested!’ said the duke. ‘How do you know? Another encounter?’
‘Why, yes, as it happens. I was passing through Jaulnay. Do you know Jaulnay?’
‘Very well. I took a sword wound in the shoulder there… So, you were passing through Jaulnay, and then, is that not the same village that the story tells us of?’
‘Let’s forget the story, Duke,’ Claire said, blushing. ‘I was passing through Jaulnay, as I said, when I
saw a troop of armed men arresting a man and taking him away. He was that man.’
‘He was! Oh, beware, Madame, you said “he”.’
‘He, the officer. My word, Duke, how deep you are. Please, enough of your wit, and if you do not feel pity for that unfortunate…’
‘Pity! I!’ exclaimed the duke. ‘Why, Madame, do I have time to feel pity, especially for those I do not know?’
Claire looked askance at La Rochefoucauld’s pale face and his thin lips bent into a cold smile, and she shuddered involuntarily.
‘I should like to have the honour of escorting you further, Madame,’ he went on. ‘But I must put a garrison in Montraud, so please forgive me if I leave you. Twenty gentlemen who are more fortunate than I will protect you until you meet up with the princess, to whom I beg you to present my respects.’
‘You are not coming to Bordeaux?’ Claire asked.
‘No, for the time being I have to go to Turenne to meet Monsieur de Bouillon. We are vying to refuse politely the role of general in this war. I have a strong opponent, but I would like to overcome him and remain a lieutenant.’
With this, the duke ceremonially saluted the viscountess and headed off slowly along the road taken by his troop of cavalry.
Claire looked after him, murmuring: ‘His pity! I mentioned his pity! He said it himself: he hasn’t time to feel pity!’
At this moment she saw a group of horsemen break off towards her, and the rest of the troop disappear into the nearby wood.
Behind them, meditatively, his reins resting on his horse’s neck, rode the man with the deceptive eyes and white hands, who would later, at the start of his memoirs, write the following observation – rather a strange one for a moral philosopher: ‘I think that one must be content with showing compassion, but beware of feeling it. It is a passion that is good for naught in a well-made soul, one that only serves to weaken the heart. It should be left to the common people, who, never acting from reason, need passion to accomplish anything.’25