The Saint-Florentin Murders (20 page)

Nicolas was striding through the gallery, having not even noticed the desolate look in Antoinette's eyes. Feeling faint, as if suffocating, but unwilling to look into the reasons why, he tried to distract himself by observing the curious manners of the Court. Husbands would meet their wives and greet them with an indifference appropriate to strangers. It was true, he thought, that these days men were busy increasing the number of their conquests and women publicly displaying their lovers. Couples living together hardly met, and never took the same carriage, nor did they ever find themselves in the same house, except in the palace. Possession for men, seduction for women: they were the only motives for attack or surrender. Loving without pleasure, surrendering without a fight, leaving one another without regrets, calling duty weakness, honour prejudice, delicacy dullness, such were the manners which Nicolas attentively observed: seduction had its code and immorality its principles. 

The time had come for the removal of the King's boots. As he entered the room where the small company was beginning to gather, buzzing with the murmur of courtiers, guards, grooms and those who were only there because their position required it, an acrid, sickly-sweet smell, a mixture of musk, scent and powder seized him by the nostrils, and a claw-like hand gripped his shoulder. From the aroma, he recognised the Maréchal de Richelieu. Thirteen years earlier, he had been in this same room when Monsieur de Sartine had brought him to see Louis XV for the first time.

‘Young Ranreuil, returning like a ghost!' exclaimed the old man. ‘How nice to see you again. How is Noblecourt?'

The question did not require an answer, but Nicolas made the mistake of forgetting that. ‘Very well, Monseigneur, like his contemporaries.'

‘I thank you, Monsieur,' squealed the maréchal, with a horrible grimace. ‘I am younger than him, by a long way! What work brings you to this country?'

‘Hunting. I hope the First Gentleman of His Majesty's Bedchamber will permit me to question him about tomorrow's hunt.'

This respect for the proprieties seemed to delight the maréchal, who proudly lifted a face coated with ceruse and rouge. His grinning mouth revealed teeth that were well on the road to ruin.

‘Well, Marquis, today they were tracking a monstrous boar, a creature of the devil usually confined to the great park. Damnation, the beast ran all the way to the gardens, frightening our people with his bloodthirsty eyes. The King, who is not a
Bourbon for nothing, gave orders for the animal to be hunted down. The big footprint it left this morning did the rest. By this time, they should be paying it their last respects.'

‘And what about tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow, for His Majesty's pleasure, they'll be hunting both animals and birds in the plain of Grenelle.'

He rose up on tiptoe and clutched Nicolas's arm to whisper something in his ear, but his voice was still so high-pitched that Nicolas doubted his words escaped anyone.

‘I'm going to tell you the latest piece of bad taste. The
Prince-Abbé
de Salms was crossing the bull's-eye antechamber yesterday with a few friends. Some young dandies who were warming themselves there started, if you can believe it, to mock him so loudly that he heard them. “There's Aesop and his court!” You know how deformed the man is! Well, he was not in the least disconcerted, and paid them back for their effrontery. “Gentlemen,” he replied, “the comparison is quite flattering to me, for Aesop made the animals speak.”'

‘Alas,' said Nicolas, ‘it seems there are countries where ridicule and flattery are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to practise one without producing more of the other!'

‘You are very censorious today,' observed the maréchal. ‘An unhappy love affair, perhaps? In this world, it is not enough to know that in order to succeed one must be ridiculous, one must also study carefully the circle in which our rank has placed us, the ridiculous ways which most concern our state, those, in a word, which are in credit, and this demands more delicacy and care than one may imagine.'
1

Nicolas was surprised by the maréchal's tone. It was true that
the wind had changed and that he was still determinedly trying to assert himself in a Court where everyone was turning away from him, including the young royal couple. This glorious relic had known the great King as a page, Madame de Maintenon, the young Duchesse de Bourgogne … He had seen the whole century. Nicolas could not help feeling a touch of compassion for this old man determined to perpetuate an immutable order.

‘Tell me, tell me,' the maréchal continued, ‘does your presence at Court have anything to do with the tragedy everyone is talking about?'

Surprised by these words, Nicolas remained silent.

‘Madame de Maurepas's angora cat has been murdered! Since then, there has been nothing but wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the culprit's head demanded on a platter. No, I see it's something else.'

He breathed in. He had underestimated the Duc de Richelieu, as people so often did.

‘Yes, I sense rather that you are here because of a somewhat unfortunate affair concerning Monsieur de La Vrillière. Are you going to tell me …?'

Nicolas did not bat an eyelid.

‘Oh, don't worry, I can read you like a book. You say nothing, but your sealed lips are all the more eloquent. Could you at least—'

The cries of the ushers and the dull thud of the halberds striking the floor, announcing the return of the King's procession from the hunt, saved Nicolas, who ignored Richelieu's insistence and bowed deferentially. The room was a sea of bent backs. The King, his face flushed and his coat dripping water, looked around
the gathering. He was so tall that he dominated it, and his hunting boots made him even taller, but, as he did not rise to his full height, the effect was not as majestic as it might have been. He seemed to look at everyone surreptitiously, screwing up his eyes without, however, appearing to recognise anyone. He made a few hesitant advances and retreats, his arms dangling. Nicolas noticed that his profile recalled that of the late King, but was less firm. His already bloated neck sank between his shoulders. His blue eyes were inscrutable, lacking the dark velvetiness of his predecessor's. On his lips there hovered an inexpressive, almost innocent smile. He passed Nicolas, approached him, bent down and focused his gaze on him.

‘Ranreuil, follow me when I go back to my private rooms.'

These few words created a stir. All eyes turned to the beneficiary of the King's attention. Everyone knew how
short-sighted
the monarch was and how hard he found it to recognise his servants. The Maréchal de Richelieu saw fit to intervene at this point. ‘Sire,' he said, ‘please allow the First Gentleman—'

The King turned his back on him, without giving any indication that he had even heard him. Nicolas knew that the royal couple had been behaving particularly badly to Richelieu lately, hoping in this way to force him to give up his position and stop bothering them with a presence that reminded the Queen all too sharply of the hated Madame du Barry. But it was no good, he just kept on, pretending not to understand the many eloquent signs of his fall from favour and ignoring the many jokes of which he was the butt.

After the King had wiped himself down with towels, some of his servants changed his clothes. Or at least, with the
twenty-year
-old
monarch behaving more like an adolescent, they tried to. With a laugh, he dodged the shirt he was handed, lowering his neck at the crucial moment. The grooms were accustomed to these jokes and played the game with good grace. The King choked with laughter and stamped now one foot, now the other. The arrival of a newcomer brought the joking to an end. Nicolas recognised Monsieur de Maurepas. He ceremoniously greeted Louis XVI, gave Richelieu a knowing smile, and looked at Nicolas inquisitively.

Tall and thin, with a noble bearing, lean legs, a high forehead, wide blue eyes and a pale face, Maurepas smiled without opening his small mouth. His image, nonchalant, self-assured, reassuring, was that of an old, still handsome man with a good-natured,
easy-going
air. Richelieu pulled Nicolas back and, again clinging to his arm to raise himself a little, whispered in his ear, ‘Did you know that his reputation for impotence is extremely well founded? He has all the faults of a eunuch, loving and tormenting women without satisfying them …' He laughed. ‘He hates nothing more than to have his back against the wall. Or should I say, against the bed?'

Nicolas was sweating blood for fear that the maréchal's shrill voice would be overheard. But the King was talking about the hunt and the solitary old boar, which he himself had dispatched with a well-aimed blow of his dagger. A murmur of approval followed this announcement. The minister began talking to the monarch in a low voice. The commissioner looked at this curious combination of the past and future. He knew what people said: that on the vessel of State, Monsieur de Maurepas was more of a passenger than a pilot, that there were two men inside him, the
one who saw and the one who navigated. Alas, continued the rumour, the former was perceptive and enlightened, the latter fickle and irresolute. The King liked him, because his own qualities and flaws were similar to the old man's. It was as if he were seeing himself in a mirror.

With the ease of half a century's expertise, the minister, having begun speaking, would not stop. He talked interminably, for in him everything began and ended with words. He had the reputation of rarely listening to anyone else, and of always speaking before thinking. Nicolas watched the scene, and the attentive gathering around it, without really seeing them. What was he, the man for special investigations, doing here? What role was he playing? Of course, he was perfectly familiar with the circumlocution, the etiquette, the true and false faces, the traps of all kinds. A traveller accustomed to the tempests of this country, he nevertheless felt like an outsider. It was as if he were watching himself playing a game, a game in which he participated without becoming involved, a game in which he knew all the required words and gestures by heart but could only hold his own by remaining cold, analytical and devoid of passion. In this society where the only things that mattered were subtle distinctions and the precise hierarchy of rank and privilege, he was dancing on shifting sands to a music whose scales he had learnt a long time ago – to tell the truth, ever since his father's salons in the chateau at Ranreuil. Skilful at avoiding the dangers, never uttering a word for which he might have been reprimanded, a courtier by obligation, a servant by necessity, a man of the King by
profession
, loyal by inclination, he had mastered the customs of this world and these people without embarrassment or pleasure, but
was separated from them by an invisible wall, and had no wish to know who had decided to build it.

Whether this wall was a means of attack or defence, even he himself was not sure. Free within his armour, nothing could touch him; no word, however deadly in these times of ridicule, could reach him. The only words that could have an effect on him were those that might come, whether through misfortune or by some strange chance, from the mouth of the King. He felt a kind of wave of happiness and pride at being, basically, so free and so detached. Yes, he thought, fate had thrust him into a setting from which he could always escape, just as in his childhood dreams, whatever the circumstances. That was how he was able to maintain his rightful place within a rigid system where the slightest false step could break a reputation, tarnish a name and compromise a career. This thicket of traps, the home to so many false reputations, was negotiated by Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch with polite indifference and the confidence of experience.

Maurepas continued to hold forth while the King listened in
open-eyed
wonder and his servants attended to him. Nicolas compared the minister to Noblecourt. More or less the same age, they had once attended the festivities of Regency Paris together. One seemed to have endured without learning anything, while the other belonged to ‘that small, select number of excellent men who, having been endowed with a fine and particular natural strength, have carefully honed it, through study and by skill, and have brought it to the highest point of wisdom it can reach'. Montaigne's words had come spontaneously to his mind, a vestige of his
adolescent reading in the library of the chateau at Ranreuil. His basic feelings about d'Aiguillon's successor echoed the public's judgement: Maurepas, well shaven, well powdered, well rejuvenated, gave the impression of thinking deeply about nothing.

The noise of the arms carried by the guards, announcing the departure of the King, brought him back to reality. He hastened to follow, along the same route he had taken during his first visit to Versailles. Reaching his apartments, the King turned and signalled to Nicolas to come with him to another, even more private domain. From the little gallery overlooking the Cour des Cerfs, there was a dark, narrow spiral staircase. This led them to a wide door, which opened into a large attic room dominated, from the first, by a strong smell of filings, leather and rope. From there, it was possible to reach a small belvedere with a view over the roofs of the palace, the gardens and the park. At a glance, Nicolas saw model ships, navigational instruments, clocks either intact or dismantled, locks and various mechanisms. Books and maps were scattered everywhere, along with other objects which all pointed to their owner's curiosity. Clearly this was a personal hideaway, a place for the King to relax. Of course, he had known his visitor for a long time.