Paris: The Novel (65 page)

He’d discussed the meeting carefully with Alain. For once, his younger brother was nervous. “What shall I do? What shall I say?” he’d asked.

“Just be yourself, my dear brother. People always like you exactly as you are. And even if you tried to pretend to be something else, the king would see through you at once. Remember, there isn’t much in life he hasn’t seen. There are just four things you need to know.”

“What are those?”

“First, wherever he goes, there will be women. Be polite to them all. Any one of them may be a mistress; perhaps several of them. One of them may even be his wife.

“Second, you love his new bridge. The one that’s nearly finished. I showed it to you the other day. Do you remember what I told you?”

“The Pont Neuf. Built in stone. Goes right across the whole river, just touches the tip of the central island on the way.”

“And? You’ve forgotten something.”

“Ah. It will have no houses on it. Just a bridge. Pure and simple. First one in Paris without houses. Why does it matter?”

“Because one will have an unobstructed view along the river to the Louvre, which will look more gracious. The king is obsessed with this idea. On no account forget it.”

“I won’t.”

“Third, if he asks you to gamble, accept at once, even if you haven’t any money.”

“But if I lose?”

“Very unlikely. The king nearly always loses. He loves to lose. He loves giving money to people. Sully has to find the money to settle all his gambling debts. It drives the old man mad. I suspect the king finds that amusing.”

“You said there were four things. What’s the fourth?”

“Ah. Yes. That’s a bit special.” Robert grimaced. And then he told his brother what it was.

“Oh my God,” said Alain.

King Henry IV of France. King of Navarre. Born Catholic. Made a Protestant by his mother. Remained so until, on that fateful Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Catherine de Médicis threatened him with death if he didn’t become a Catholic.

And who knew, he might have remained a Catholic if Catherine and the Guises hadn’t made one miscalculation. They’d supposed the massacre of 1572 would terrify the remaining Protestants into silence. It didn’t. Though royal armies attacked in force, the great Protestant strongholds like La Rochelle held out. Soon they were pressing the government for freedom of worship just as strongly as before.

Once again, Henry of Navarre became a Protestant. It took him years to get his following back, but finally, he had a Protestant army behind him.

Would the throne of France be his? Nostradamus had said it would. When Catherine de Médicis had paid him a visit, he’d told her things would fall out this way. None of her sons left a legitimate male heir. Her last son, a talented transvestite, had no interest in producing one. Upon his death, therefore, the throne was Henry’s to inherit.

But the Catholic Guises were not done yet. They formed the Catholic League. Spain came to their aid. When Henry and his army came to Paris, they found a Catholic city, reinforced with Spanish troops.

There was a siege. There were endless talks. But in the end Henry had no choice. Paris, as people said, was worth a Mass. He became Catholic again, and got the throne of France. But he did not turn his back on his Protestant followers. In 1598, he issued the great Edict of Nantes, which allowed Protestants to worship as they pleased.

And he reigned, for all his faults, the most genial king the French had ever known.

They found him in the huge courtyard of the Louvre. There was a party of people with him, more women than men.

“Is the queen there?” Alain whispered as they approached.

If the king’s love life was busy, his marriages were somewhat eccentric. The marriage to Catherine de Médicis’s daughter, back in 1572, had not been a success. Henry and his wife had been cheerfully unfaithful to each other and in the end the pope had obligingly annulled their marriage. They remained friends, however, and Henry had recently built her a splendid palace near the Louvre. For years he had lived only with his mistresses. But finally he had married yet another of the Médicis family.

Marie de Médicis was not among his women today, however.

“They say her conversation’s pretty limited,” Robert informed his brother. “But she is wonderful at breeding children.” The Bourbons didn’t want to run out of heirs like their Valois cousins.

A courtier came to intercept them, remembered Robert, greeted Alain most amiably and led them toward the king. As he approached, Alain had a chance to observe the monarch. His curly hair and pointed beard were graying and clipped short. His face was full of intelligence and cunning, and amusement. He wasn’t especially tall, but he held himself very erect. He reminded Alain of a ram entering a field of sheep.

“Remember the fourth thing I told you,” whispered Robert. The king was only ten paces away now.

And then it hit them. Robert smiled. Alain also tried to smile, but it wasn’t easy.

For he had just smelled the king.

King Henry IV stank. He did not like to wash. The acrid smell of stale sweat that emanated from his body was striking even in an age when baths were rare. As for his breath … the combination of garlic, fish, meat and wine consumed over days, and never washed out of his mouth, produced a halitosis so thick, so putrid, that as Alain drew close, he almost retched.

How in the world, he wondered, can he stink so badly and still keep all these women?

But he made his deepest bows and found the king’s swarthy, intelligent face looking at him with every sign of approval.

“Welcome to Paris,” the monarch said genially. “Do you like it?”

“Most certainly, Your Majesty.”

“Have you seen my bridge?”

“I understand, Your Majesty, that they started building it wide, to support the usual houses, but that you forbade them to build any houses. I think it will look magnificent.”

“Excellent. Whoever told you to say that was quite right.” The king laughed. Alain almost winced as the breath reached him, but managed to smile instead. “Rather than putting houses on the bridge and spoiling the view, I intend to build some splendid town houses on the triangle of land where the bridge crosses the tip of the island.” The king nodded with satisfaction. “And as you see,” he continued, making a sweeping gesture toward the long building behind him, “we are building in the Louvre as well.”

It had to be confessed, the huge palace was still a mess. During the course of the last century, the kings of France had discovered that it was one thing to abandon the old royal palace on the Île de la Cité for the huge site around the Louvre, but it was another to decide what they wanted once they got there.

Not that anyone wanted to move back to the island. Apart from the Gothic glories of the Sainte-Chapelle, the old palace on the Île de la Cité had turned into a huge warren of law courts, dungeons and royal offices. But over at the Louvre, each generation seemed determined to make their mark, and the result was a failure of unity.

The central, Renaissance palace was promising, but Catherine de Médicis had built a palace of her own at the far end of the Tuileries, cutting off what might have been a noble view toward the west. A much better enterprise, which King Henry had now taken in hand personally, was the splendid series of galleries running westward from the Renaissance palace along the bank of the Seine. It ran for a quarter of a mile.

“Some people say,” Robert had told his brother, “that if there’s ever serious trouble, King Henry reckons he can run along the galleries and escape from a discreet side door at the western end. Like some of the palaces in Florence.”

More likely, the galleries were to be a noble setting for impressing visiting foreigners with the splendors of the royal art collections.

So when the king turned to Alain now and asked him, “Do you know what is so important about the long gallery?” Alain went for the art collection.

“Not at all. It’s the lower floor that’s the best thing about this new wing. Do you know what I’m going to use it for? Workshops. Artists’ studios. Scores of them. We’ll give the craftsmen space there. It’ll be like a huge academy. A hive of activity.” His enthusiasm was palpable. “A country is nothing, de Cygne, until it has peace. And a king is nothing if he does not promote the arts and crafts of his country. And a palace is nothing but an empty shell, unless it is the center of useful activity. So I am going to fill this palace with workshops.”

He turned to Robert.

“You are staying in the Marais, aren’t you?”

“I am, sire.”

“You must show your brother the site of my new square. They’ve started clearing the ground. It’s on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, before you get to the Bastille. There’ll be colonnades at street level where people can walk. And above that, houses and apartments for honest working people. All built in brick and stone. A haven for modest townsmen, in the aristocratic quarter. I’m going to call it the Place Royale.” He suddenly looked at Alain. “Do you approve of my efforts for ordinary people, monsieur?”

“Yes, sire.”

“Why?”

Alain paused to think. He really hadn’t considered such a proposition before.

“I suppose,” he said, “it’s similar to the religious question. France is at peace now after being torn apart by religious divisions. But men can be divided by other things as well. If there is hatred between the classes, that is dangerous too. After all, there have been peasants’ revolts in history, and they were terrible. It seems to me that Your Majesty is seeking to make France at peace with itself.” He stopped, afraid that he might have spoken too much.

“Good,” said the king. He nodded approval. “Now then, to business, messieurs,” he continued. “As you have only the one estate,” he addressed himself to Robert, “your brother will have to make his way in the world. Have you been to see Sully?”

“Yes, sire.”

Alain did not know what this meant, but Robert did. The king’s question
was not really a question at all. It was a broad hint that Sully had already told him about his efforts on behalf of his brother.

“I doubt you got anything from him,” the king remarked. “He never wastes money. Did he tell you I was extravagant?”

Alain’s mouth opened wide. What a question. How on earth did one respond to that? But Robert knew better than to tell his king a foolish lie.

“He did, sire,” he replied with a smile. “But I did not believe it.”

“What a good answer!” The king grinned. “You can never believe a word that comes out of Sully’s mouth. If you see him again, tell him I said so.”

And this promising conversation seemed about to take a useful turn, when a group of ladies came up to the king.

“Your Majesty is neglecting us,” one of them said reproachfully. “You were going to tell us what happened at Fontainebleau.”

Robert looked dismayed at this sudden interruption. Just as they had the king’s attention, were they about to lose it?

King Henry turned to the ladies.

“So I was.” He nodded. “You shall all hear it,” he called out. And at this signal the entire company hastened to gather in a circle around the monarch. “It happened last week, at the Château de Fontainebleau,” the king explained. “I was there, my wife was there, my little son, and the usual company. And we had an unusual entertainment, arranged by the English ambassador. A company of players. They gave us a play by a man named Shakespeare. Has anyone heard of this writer of plays? No? Well, nor had I, but they think highly of him in England. And you can imagine my excitement when, as I supposed, they told me their play was about myself.”

“A wonderful subject,” cried one of the courtiers.

“I quite agree,” said King Henry amiably. “But it turned out that it was about the English Henry IV. My chagrin was great. But what could I do? We all sat down. I put my son beside me. He’s only three, but I thought it would be good for him. A prince cannot be too young to learn how to be bored.” He gave them all an ironic look. “And so, my friends, the play began. I will not say I understood it all, but it had a big, fat character in it called Falstaff who seemed to be quite amusing.