13. Débonnaire

THEREAFTER Florian went to the Duke of Orléans, with two motives. One was the obvious necessity of obtaining a pardon for having killed the Chevalier: Florian’s other motive was the promise given to brown Janicot that he should have for his Christmas present, upon this day of the winter solstice, the life of the greatest man in the kingdom. The greatest man in the kingdom, undoubtedly, was Philippe of Orléans, the former Regent, now prime minister, and the next heir to the throne. The King was nobody in comparison: besides, the King was not a man but a child of thirteen. One must be logical. Florian regretted the loss of his friend, for he was unfeignedly fond of Orléans, but a promise once given by a Puysange was not to be evaded.

He must get the pardon first. Florian foresaw that the granting of a pardon out of hand for his disastrous duel would seem to the Duke of Orléans an action liable to involve the prime minister in difficulties. Florian thought otherwise, in the light of his firm belief that to-morrow Orléans would be oblivious of all earthly affairs, but this was not an argument which Florian could tactfully employ. Rather, he counted upon the happy fact that Florian’s services in the past were not benefits which any reflective statesman would care to ignore. Yes, the pardon would certainly be forthcoming, Florian assured himself, this afternoon, as he rode forth in his great gilded coach, for his last chat, as he rather vexedly reflected, with all-powerful Philippe of Orléans, whom people called Philippe the Débonnaire.

“So!” said the minister, when they had embraced, “so, they tell me that you have married again, and that you killed your brother this morning. I am not pleased with you, Florian. These escapades will come to no good end.”

“Ah, monseigneur, but I like to take a wife occasionally, whereas you prefer always to borrow one. It is merely a question of taste, about which we need not quarrel. As to this duel, I lamented the necessity, your highness, as much as anybody. But these meddling women—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” replied Orléans, “your sister-in-law talks too much. In fact, as I recall it, she talks even in her sleep.”

“Monseigneur, and will you never learn discretion?”

“I am discreet enough, in any event, to look upon fratricide rather seriously. So I am sending you to the Bastile for a while, Florian, and indeed the lettre de cachet ordering your imprisonment was made out an hour ago.”

Florian at this had out the small gold box upon whose lid was painted a younger and far more amiable looking Orléans than frowned here in the flesh,—in a superfluity of flesh,—and Florian took snuff. It was always a good way of gaining time for reflection. Wine and cakes were set ready upon the little table. Philippe was probably expecting some woman. There had been no lackeys in the corridor which led to this part of the château. Philippe always sent them away when any of his women were to come in the day-time. Yes, one was quite alone with this corpulent, black-browed and purple-faced Philippe, in this quiet room, which was like a great gilded shell of elaborately carved woodwork, and which had bright panels everywhere, upon the walls and the ceiling, representing, very explicitly indeed, The Triumphs of Love. Such solitude was uncommonly convenient; and one might speak without reticence.

Florian put up his snuff-box, dusted his finger-tips, and said: “I regret to oppose you in anything, monseigneur, but for me to go to prison would be inconvenient just now. I have important business at the Feast of the Wheel to-morrow night.”

Since Philippe had lost the sight of his left eye he cocked his head like a huge bird whenever he looked at you intently. “You had best avoid these sorceries, Florian. I have not yet forgotten that fiend whom your accursed lieutenant evoked for us in the quarries of Vaugirard—” Orléans paused. He said in a while, “Before that night and that vision of my uncle’s death-bed, I was less ambitious, Florian, and more happy.”

“Ah, yes, poor old Mirepoix!” said Florian, smiling. “What a preposterous fraud he was, with his absurd ventriloquism and stuffed crocodiles and magic lanterns! However, he foretold very precisely indeed the extraordinary series of events which would leave you the master of this kingdom: and I had not the heart to see the faithful fellow exposed as an ignoramus who talked nonsense. So I was at some pains to help his prophesying come true, and to make you actually the only surviving male relative at the old King’s death-bed.”

“Let us speak,” said Orléans, with a vexed frown, “of cheerier matters. Now, in regard to your imprisonment—”

“I was coming to your notion of a merry topic. This visit to the Feast of the Wheel is about a family matter, your highness, and is imperative. So I must keep my freedom for the while: and I must ask, in place of a lettre de cachet, a pardon in full.”

“Instead, Florian, let us have fewer ‘musts’ and more friendliness in this affair.” Orléans now put his arm about Florian. “Come, I will put off your arrest until the day after to-morrow; you shall spend the night here, my handsome pouting Florian; and you shall be liberated at the end of one little week in the Bastile.”

Florian released himself, rather petulantly. “Pardieu! but I entreat you to reserve these endearments for your bed-chamber! No, you must find some other playfellow for to-night. And I really cannot consent to be arrested, for it would quite spoil my Christmas.”

Orléans, rebuffed, said only, “But if I continue to ignore your misbehaviors, people will talk.”

“That is possible, your highness. It is certain that, under arrest, I also would become garrulous.”

“Ah! and of what would you discourse?”

Florian looked for a while at his red-faced friend beyond the red-topped writing-table.

Florian said: “I would talk of the late Dauphin’s death, monseigneur; of the death of the Duc de Bourgogne; of the death of the little Duc de Bretagne; and of the death of the Duc de Berri. I would talk of those inexplicable fatal illnesses among your kinsmen which of a sudden made you, who were nobody of much consequence, the master of France and the next heir to the throne.”

Orléans said nothing for a time. Speaking, his voice was quiet, but a little hoarse. “It is perhaps as well for you, my friend, that my people have been dismissed. Yes, I am expecting Madame de Phalaris, who is as yet amusingly shame-faced about her adulteries. So there is nobody about, and we may speak frankly. With frankness, then, I warn you that it is not wholesome to threaten a prince of the blood, and that if you continue in this tone you may not long be permitted to talk anywhere, not even in one of the many prisons at my disposal.”

“Ah, your highness, let us not speak of my death, for it is a death which you would deplore.”

“Would I deplore your death?” Orléans’ head was now cocked until it almost lay upon his left shoulder. “It is a fact of which I am not wholly persuaded.”

“Monseigneur, mere self-respect demands that one’s death should rouse some grief among one’s friends. So I have made certain that your grief would be inevitable and deep. For I am impatient of truisms—”

“And what have truisms to do with our affair?”

“The statement that dead men tell no tales, your highness, is a truism.”

“Yes, and to be candid, Florian, it is that particular truism of which I was just thinking.”

“Well, it is this particular truism I have elected to deride. My will is made, the disposing of my estate is foreordered, and every legacy enumerated. One of these legacies is in the form of a written narrative: it is not a romance, it is an entirely veracious chronicle, dealing with the last hours of four of your kinsmen; and it is bequeathed to a fifth kinsman, to your cousin, the Duc de Bourbon. Should I die in one of your prisons, monseigneur,—a calamity which I perceive to be already fore-shadowed in your mind,—that paper would go to him.”

The Duke of Orléans considered this. There had been much whispering; mobs in the street had shouted, “Burn the poisoner!” when Orléans passed: but this was different. Once Bourbon had half the information which Florian de Puysange was able to give, there would be of course no question of burning Orléans, since one does not treat a prince of the blood like fuel: but there would be no doubt, either, of his swift downfall nor of his subsequent death by means of the more honorable ax.

Orléans knew all this. Orléans also knew Florian. In consequence Orléans asked, “Is what you tell me the truth?”

“Faith of a gentleman, monseigneur!”

Orléans sighed. “It is a pity. By contriving this conditional post-mortem sort of confession to the devil-work you prompted, you have contrived an equally devilish safeguard. Yes, if you are telling the truth, for me to have you put out of the way would be injudicious. And you do tell the truth, confound you! Broad-minded as you are in many ways, Florian, you are a romantic, and I have never known you to break your given word or to voice any purely utilitarian lie. You are positively queer about that.”

“I confess it,” said Florian, frankly. “Puysange lies only for pleasure, never for profit. But what do my foibles matter? Let us be logical about this! What does anything matter except the plain fact that we are useful to each other? I do not boast, but I think you have found me efficient. You needed only a precipitating of the inevitable, a little hastening here and there of natural processes, to give you your desires. Well, four of these accelerations have been brought about through the recipes of a dear old friend of mine, through invaluable recipes which have made you the master of this kingdom. It is now always within your power, without any real trouble, to remove the scrofulous boy whose living keeps you from being even in title King of France. Yes, I think I have helped you. Some persons would in my position be exigent. But all I ask is your name written upon a bit of paper. I will even promise you that your mercifulness shall create no adverse comment, and that to-morrow people shall be talking of something quite different.”

And Florian smiled ingratiatingly, the while that he fingered what was in his waistcoat pocket, and reflected that all France would very certainly have more than enough to talk about to-morrow.

“This dapper imp, in his eternal bottle-green and silver, will be the ruin of me,” Orléans observed. But he had already drawn a paper from the top drawer: and he filled it in, and signed it, and he pushed it across the red-topped writing-table, toward Florian.

“I thank you, monseigneur, for this favor,” said Florian, then, “and I long to repay it by making you King of France. Let us drink to Philippe the Seventh!”

“No,” said Orleans,—“let us drink if you will, but i have no thirst for kingship. I play with the idea, of course. To be a king sounds well, and I once thought—But it would give me no more than I already have of endless nuisances to endure. As matters stand, I can make shift with the discomforts of being a great personage, because I know that I can, whenever I like, lay aside my greatness. I can at will become again a private person, and I can find a host of fools eager to fill my place. But from the throne there is no exit save into the vaults of St. Denis. So I procrastinate, I play with the idea of putting the boy out of the way, but I do nothing definite until to-morrow.”

“There are many adages that speak harshly of procrastination,” said Florian, as he poured and, with his back to Orléans, flavored the wine which was set ready. “Logic is a fine thing, monseigneur: and logic informs me that no man is sure of living until to-morrow.”

“But it is no fun being a great personage,” Orléans lamented, as he took the tall, darkly glowing glass. “I have had my bellyful of it: and I find greatness rather thin fare. I am master of France, indeed I may with some show of reason claim to be master of Europe. I used to think it would be pleasant to rule kingdoms; but you may take my word for it, Florian, the game is not worth the candle. There are times,” said Orléans, as lazily he sipped the wine which Florian had just seasoned, “there are times when I wish I were dead and done with it all.”

“That, your highness, will come soon enough.”

“Yes, but do you judge what I have to contend with.” Orléans launched into a bewailing of his political difficulties. Florian kept a polite pose of attention, without exactly listening to these complaints about Parliament’s obstinacy, about Alberoni’s and Villeroy’s plottings in their exile, about the sly underminings of Fréjus, about what the legitimated princes were planning now, about Bourbon, about Noailles, about the pig-headedness of the English Pretender, about the empty Treasury—Of these things Philippe was talking, in a jumble of words without apparent end or meaning. But Florian thought of a circumstance unrelated to any of these matters, with a sort of awed amusement.

“All this to make a maniac of me,” the minister went on, “and with what to balance it? Anything I choose to ask for, of course. But then, Florian, what the deuce is there in life for one to ask for at forty-nine? I was once a joyous glutton: now I have to be careful of my digestion. I used to stay drunk for weeks: now one night of virtually puritanic debauchery leaves me a wreck to be patched up by physicians who can talk about nothing but apoplexy. Women no longer rouse any curiosity. I know so well what their bodies are like that an investigation is tautology: and half the time I go to bed with no inclination to do anything but sleep. Not even my daughters, magnificent women that you might think them—”

“I know,” said Florian, with a reminiscent smile.

“—Not even they are able to amuse me any more. No, my friend, I candidly voice my opinion that there is nothing in life which possession does not discover to be inadequate: we are cursed with a tyrannous need for what life does not afford: and we strive for various prizes, saying ‘Happiness is there,’ when in point of fact it is nowhere. They who fail in their endeavors have still in them the animus of desire: but the man who attains his will cohabits with an assassin, for, having it, he perceives that he does not want it; and desire is dead in him, and the man too is dead. No, Florian, be advised by me; and do you avoid greatness as you should—and by every seeming do not,—the devil!”

So Philippe d’Orléans also, thought Florian, had got what he wanted, only to find it a damnable nuisance. Probably all life was like that. Over-high and over-earnest desires were inadvisable. It was a sort of comfort to reflect that poor Philippe at least would soon be through with his worries.

A bell rang; and Florian, rising, said: “I shall heed your advice, monseigneur—But that bell perhaps announces an arrival about which I should remain in polite ignorance?”

“Yes, it is Madame de Phalaris. We are to try what Aretino and Romano can suggest for our amusement, before I go up to my hour’s work with the King. So be off with you through the private way, for it is a very modest little bitch.”

Florian passed through the indicated door, but he did not quite close it. Instead, he waited there, and he saw the entrance of charming tiny Madame de Phalaris, whom Orléans greeted with tolerable ardor.

“So you have come at last, you delicious rogue, to end my expounding of moral sentiments. And with what fairy tale, bright-eyed Sapphira, will you explain your lateness?”

“Indeed, your highness,” said the lady, who had learned that in these encounters the Duke liked to be heartened with some gambit of free talk, “indeed, your question reminds me that only last night I heard the most diverting fairy tale. But it is somewhat—”

“Yes?” said the Duke.

“I mean, that it is rather—”

“But I adore that especial sort of fairy story,” he announced. “So of course we must have it, and equally of course we must spare our mutual blushes.”

Thus speaking, Orléans sat at her feet, and leaned back his head between her knees, so that neither could see the face of the other. Her lithe white fingers stroked his cheeks, caressing those great pendulous red jaws: and her sea-green skirts, flowered with a pattern of slender vines, were spread like billows to each side of him.

“There was once,” the lady began, “a king and a queen—”

“I know the tale,” Orléans said,—“they had three sons. And the two elder failed in preposterous quests, but the third prince succeeded in everything, and he was damnably bored by everything. I know the tale only too well—”

He desisted from speaking. But he was making remarkable noises.

“Highness—!” cried Madame de Phalaris.

She had risen in alarm; and as she rose, the Duke’s head fell to the crimson-covered footstool at her feet. He did not move, but lay quite still, staring upward, and his foreshortened face, as Florian saw it, was of a remarkable shade of purple among the elaborate dark curls of Orléans’ peruke.

There was for a moment utter silence. You heard only the gilded clock upon the red chimney-piece. Then Madame de Phalaris screamed.

Nobody replied. She rang wildly at the bell-cord beside the writing-table. You could hear a remote tinkling, but nothing else. The shaking woman lifted fat Orléans, and propped him against the chair in which she had just been sitting. Philippe of Orléans sprawled thus, more drunken looking than Florian had ever seen him in life: the corpse was wholly undignified. The head of him whom people had called Philippe the Débonnaire had fallen sideways, so that his black peruke was pushed around and hid a third of his face. The left eye, the eye with which Philippe had for years seen nothing, yet leered at the woman before him. She began again to scream. She ran from the room, and Florian could now just hear her as she ran, still screaming, about the corridors in which she could find nobody. It sounded like the squeaking of a frightened rat.

Florian came forward without hurry, for there was no pressing need of haste. Florian quite understood that Orléans had dismissed all his attendants, so that Madame de Phalaris might come to him unobserved: her husband was a notionary man. After a little amorous diversion with the lady, Orléans had meant to go up that narrow staircase yonder, for an hour’s work with the young King. It was odd to reflect that poor Philippe would never go to the King nor to any woman’s bed, not ever any more; odd, too, that anyone could be thus private in this enormous château wherein lived several thousand persons. At all events, this privacy was uncommonly convenient.

So Florian reflected for an instant, after his usual fashion of fond lingering upon what life afforded of the quaint. It was certainly very quaint that history should be so plastic. He had, with no especial effort or discomfort, with no real straining of his powers, changed the history of all Europe when he transferred this famous kingdom of France and the future of France from the keeping of Philippe to guardians more staid. Probably Monsieur de Bourbon would be the next minister. But whoever might be minister in name, the Bishop of Fréjus, the young King’s preceptor, would now be the actual master of everything. Well, to have taken France from a debauchee like this poor staring gaping Philippe here,—Florian abstractedly straightened the thing’s peruke,—to give control of France to such an admirable prelate as André de Fleury was in all a praiseworthy action. It was a logical action.

Then Florian performed unhurriedly the rite which was necessary, and there was a sign that Janicot accepted his Christmas present. It was not a pleasant sign to witness, nor did they who served Janicot appear to be squeamish. After this came two hairy persons, not unfamiliar to Florian, and these two removed as much as their master desired of Philippe d’Orléans. They answered, too, in a fashion no whit less impressive because of their not speaking, the questions which Florian put as to the proper manner of his coming to Janicot and the Feast of the Wheel. Then they were not in this room: and Florian, somewhat shaken, also went from this room, not as they had gone but by way of the little private door.

It was a full half-hour, Florian learned afterward, before Madame de Phalaris returned with a cortége of lackeys and physicians. These last attempted to bleed Duke Philippe, but found their endeavors wasted: La Tophania’s recipes were reliable, and to all appearance he had for some while been dead of apoplexy. The obscene toy discovered, hanging about his neck, when they went to undress him, surprised nobody: the Duke had affected these oddities. When the physicians made yet other discoveries, a trifle later, they flutteringly agreed this death must, without any further discussion, be reported to have arisen from natural causes. “Monsieur d’Orléans,” said one of them, jesting with rather gray lips, “has died assisted by his usual confessor.”

Florian had of course not needed to amass good precedents for putting out of life anybody who was to all intents a reigning monarch. As he glanced back at history, this seemed to him almost the favorite avocation of estimable persons. So, as Florian rode leisurely away in his great gilded coach, leaving behind him the second fruits of the attainment of his desire, if he lazily afforded a sidethought to Marcus Brutus and Jacques Clément and Aristogeiton and Ehud the Benjaminite, and to a few other admirable assassins of high potentates, it was through force of habit rather than any really serious consideration. For the important thing to be considered now was how to come by the sword Flamberge, for which Florian had, that day, paid.

Demon