The Cat and the King Read Free Page B

ago.”
    â€œLet me see if I can name them,” said my good little student, holding up a hand to count fingers. “They are the king himself, of course, and his son and three grandsons, his brother and nephew...”
    â€œTo be exact, those are not princes of the blood,” I corrected her. “The dauphin and his children are sons of France. And ‘Monsieur,’ the king’s brother, due d’Orléans, as a child of Louis XIII, is, of course, also a son of France. Chartres,
his
son, ranks as a grandson of France. The princes of the blood today are the Bourbon-Condés and the Bourbon-Contis, but they have to go all the way back to Saint Louis in the male line to find their first royal ancestor!” I was now almost solemn, as befitted the gravity of the topic.
    â€œBut suppose they were all to die out? Sons and grandsons of France and princes of the blood?”
    â€œThen the peers, after seeking divine guidance, would select another first family. I presume they would start with the Uzès, who are the premier dukes.”
    â€œBut wouldn’t even a ‘legitimated’ bastard of the king, in such an emergency, have a better claim than some completely unrelated duke?”
    Scandalized by this idea, I was about to reprove her, when I reminded myself that she was simply trying to learn. I was silent for a few moments until I had regained my calm. “In a Christian society,” I told her, as we now walked slowly on, “we must be regulated by the sacraments. The king is our master, but no more so than God is his. He must be subject to the divine constitution. If he is to be free to promote his illicit seed to the throne, we have no more dignity than did the slaves of Attila. There have to be things a man will stand up for and die for, or life is not worth living.”
    â€œBut of course I see that, dear!” Gabrielle exclaimed with sudden warmth. “I
want
to believe in the things you believe in. It’s just that I have to understand them first. My father, you see, taught me that the king was everything.”
    â€œThe king is a great deal,” I conceded. “But he is not everything. And he shouldn’t wish to be. And if he would only listen to his peers and not to his middle-class lawyer-ministers, he wouldn’t!”
    We saw now approaching us a cortege of courtiers following the great wheeled sedan-chair of Madame de Maintenon, drawn by two porters. Walking slowly beside it was the king himself. He was showing his wife the latest changes in the garden. When he raised his hand, an usher would tell the porters to halt. He would then tap on the glass, which the occupant would lower, and he would lean down to explain the removal of a statue or the creation of a fountain. It was remarkable to see the mightiest monarch in Christendom stooping to whisper his views through a slit in the window to a lady who was probably not even listening.
    â€œLet us join the group,” Gabrielle whispered to me. “It doesn’t look well to be so apart.”
    ***
    Little by little Gabrielle came to be acquainted with the persons whose names and ranks she had so carefully conned. I took her one morning to call on the king’s oldest bastard daughter by the Montespan, the duchesse de Bourbon, known in court as “Madame la Duchesse,” in her great apartment in the south wing. Madame la Duchesse was certainly not a particular friend of mine, but she was intimate with her husband’s brother-in-law, the prince de Conti, my hero, and I cultivated her for his sake.
    â€œI certainly congratulate you on your choice, Monsieur de Saint-Simon!” the duchess said, snapping her dark, mocking eyes at Gabrielle. “We had no idea that you had an eye so sensitive to pulchritude. We feared you might bring us some little brown bride from the provinces and tell us that she was descended from Julius Caesar. But this is better. Oh, this is very