"You blamed the Saint-Bartholomew," said Charles, "and now you—"

"That is over," she said; "besides, I agree with Madame Catherine that it was better to do it yourselves than let the Guises do it."

"Charles VII. had only men to fight; I am face to face with ideas," resumed the king. "We can kill men, but we can't kill words! The Emperor Charles V. gave up the attempt; his son Philip has spent his strength upon it; we shall all perish, we kings, in that struggle. On whom can I rely? To right, among the Catholics, I find the Guises, who are my enemies; to left, the Calvinists, who will never forgive me the death of my poor old Coligny, nor that bloody day in August; besides, they want to suppress the throne; and in front of me what have I?—my mother!"

"Arrest her; reign alone," said Marie in a low voice, whispering in his ear.

"I meant to do so yesterday; to-day I no longer intend it. You speak of it rather coolly."

"Between the daughter of an apothecary and that of a doctor there is no great difference," replied Touchet, always ready to laugh at the false origin attributed to her.

The king frowned.

"Marie, don't take such liberties. Catherine de' Medici is my mother, and you ought to tremble lest—"

"What is it you fear?"

"Poison!" cried the king, beside himself.

"Poor child!" cried Marie, restraining her tears; for the sight of such strength united to such weakness touched her deeply. "Ah!" she continued, "you make me hate Madame Catherine, who has been so good to me; her kindness now seems perfidy. Why is she so kind to me, and bad to you? During my stay in Dauphine I heard many things about the beginning of your reign which you concealed from me; it seems to me that the queen, your mother, is the real cause of all your troubles."

"In what way?" cried the king, deeply interested.

"Women whose souls and whose intentions are pure use virtue wherewith to rule the men they love; but women who do not seek good rule men through their evil instincts. Now, the queen made vices out of certain of your noblest qualities, and she taught you to believe that your worst inclinations were virtues. Was that the part of a mother? Be a tyrant like Louis XI.; inspire terror; imitate Philip II.; banish the Italians; drive out the Guises; confiscate the lands of the Calvinists. Out of this solitude you will rise a king; you will save the throne. The moment is propitious; your brother is in Poland."

"We are two children at statecraft," said Charles, bitterly; "we know nothing except how to love. Alas! my treasure, yesterday I, too, thought all these things; I dreamed of accomplishing great deeds—bah! my mother blew down my house of cards! From a distance we see great questions outlined like the summits of mountains, and it is easy to say: 'I'll make an end of Calvinism; I'll bring those Guises to task; I'll separate from the Court of Rome; I'll rely upon my people, upon the burghers—' ah! yes, from afar it all seems simple enough! but try to climb those mountains and the higher you go the more the difficulties appear. Calvinism, in itself, is the last thing the leaders of that party care for; and the Guises, those rabid Catholics, would be sorry indeed to see the Calvinists put down. Each side considers its own interests exclusively, and religious opinions are but a cloak for insatiable ambition. The party of Charles IX. is the feeblest of all. That of the king of Navarre, that of the king of Poland, that of the Duc d'Alencon, that of the Condes, that of the Guises, that of my mother, are all intriguing one against another, but they take no account of me, not even in my own council. My mother, in the midst of so many contending elements, is, nevertheless, the strongest among them; she has just proved to me the inanity of my plans. We are surrounded by rebellious subjects who defy the law. The axe of Louis XI. of which you speak, is lacking to us. Parliament would not condemn the Guises, nor the king of Navarre, nor the Condes, nor my brother. No! the courage to assassinate is needed; the throne will be forced to strike down those insolent men who suppress both law and justice; but where can we find the faithful arm? The council I held this morning has disgusted me with everything; treason everywhere; contending interests all about me. I am tired with the burden of my crown. I only want to die in peace."

He dropped into a sort of gloomy somnolence.

"Disgusted with everything!" repeated Marie Touchet, sadly; but she did not disturb the black torpor of her lover.

Charles was the victim of a complete prostration of mind and body, produced by three things,—the exhaustion of all his faculties, aggravated by the disheartenment of realizing the extent of an evil; the recognized impossibility of surmounting his weakness; and the aspect of difficulties so great that genius itself would dread them. The king's depression was in proportion to the courage and the loftiness of ideas to which he had risen during the last few months. In addition to this, an attack of nervous melancholy, caused by his malady, had seized him as he left the protracted council which had taken place in his private cabinet. Marie saw that he was in one of those crises when the least word, even of love, would be importunate and painful; so she remained kneeling quietly beside him, her head on his knee, the king's hand buried in her hair, and he himself motionless, without a word, without a sigh, as still as Marie herself,—Charles IX. in the lethargy of impotence, Marie in the stupor of despair which comes to a loving woman when she perceives the boundaries at which love ends.

The lovers thus remained, in the deepest silence, during one of those terrible hours when all reflection wounds, when the clouds of an inward tempest veil even the memory of happiness. Marie believed that she herself was partly the cause of this frightful dejection. She asked herself, not without horror, if the excessive joys and the violent love which she had never yet found strength to resist, did not contribute to weaken the mind and body of the king. As she raised her eyes, bathed in tears, toward her lover, she saw the slow tears rolling down his pallid cheeks. This mark of the sympathy that united them so moved the king that he rushed from his depression like a spurred horse. He took Marie in his arms and placed her on the sofa.

"I will no longer be a king," he cried. "I will be your lover, your lover only, wholly given up to that happiness. I will die happy, and not consumed by the cares and miseries of a throne."

The tone of these words, the fire that shone in the half-extinct eyes of the king, gave Marie a terrible shock instead of happiness; she blamed her love as an accomplice in the malady of which the king was dying.

"Meanwhile you forget your prisoners," she said, rising abruptly.

"Hey! what care I for them? I give them leave to kill me."

"What! are they murderers?"

"Oh, don't be frightened, little one; we hold them fast. Don't think of them, but of me. Do you love me?"

"Sire!" she cried.

"Sire!" he repeated, sparks darting from his eyes, so violent was the rush of his anger at the untimely respect of his mistress. "You are in league with my mother."

"O God!" cried Marie, looking at the picture above her prie-dieu and turning toward it to say her prayer, "grant that he comprehend me!"

"Ah!" said the king suspiciously, "you have some wrong to me upon your conscience!" Then looking at her from between his arms, he plunged his eyes into hers. "I have heard some talk of the mad passion of a certain Entragues," he went on wildly. "Ever since their grandfather, the soldier Balzac, married a viscontessa at Milan that family hold their heads too high."

Marie looked at the king with so proud an air that he was ashamed. At that instant the cries of little Charles de Valois, who had just awakened, were heard in the next room. Marie ran to the door.

"Come in, Bourguignonne!" she said, taking the child from its nurse and carrying it to the king. "You are more of a child than he," she cried, half angry, half appeased.

"He is beautiful!" said Charles IX., taking his son in his arms.

"I alone know how like he is to you," said Marie; "already he has your smile and your gestures."

"So tiny as that!" said the king, laughing at her.

"Oh, I know men don't believe such things; but watch him, my Charlot, play with him. Look there! See! Am I not right?"

"True!" exclaimed the king, astonished by a motion of the child which seemed the very miniature of a gesture of his own.

"Ah, the pretty flower!" cried the mother. "Never shall he leave us! He will never cause me grief."

The king frolicked with his son; he tossed him in his arms, and kissed him passionately, talking the foolish, unmeaning talk, the pretty, baby language invented by nurses and mothers. His voice grew child-like. At last his forehead cleared, joy returned to his saddened face, and then, as Marie saw that he had forgotten his troubles, she laid her head upon his shoulder and whispered in his ear:—

"Won't you tell me, Charlot, why you have made me keep murderers in my house? Who are these men, and what do you mean to do with them? In short, I want to know what you were doing on the roofs. I hope there was no woman in the business?"

"Then you love me as much as ever!" cried the king, meeting the clear, interrogatory glance that women know so well how to cast upon occasion.

"You doubted me," she replied, as a tear shone on her beautiful eyelashes.

"There are women in my adventure," said the king; "but they are sorceresses. How far had I told you?"

"You were on the roofs near by—what street was it?"

"Rue Saint-Honore, sweetest," said the king, who seemed to have recovered himself. Collecting this thoughts, he began to explain to his mistress what had happened, as if to prepare her for a scene that was presently to take place in her presence.

"As I was passing through the street last night on a frolic," he said, "I chanced to see a bright light from the dormer window of the house occupied by Rene, my mother's glover and perfumer, and once yours. I have strong doubts about that man and what goes on in his house. If I am poisoned, the drug will come from there."

"I shall dismiss him to-morrow."

"Ah! so you kept him after I had given him up?" cried the king. "I thought my life was safe with you," he added gloomily; "but no doubt death is following me even here."

"But, my dearest, I have only just returned from Dauphine with our dauphin," she said, smiling, "and Rene has supplied me with nothing since the death of the Queen of Navarre. Go on; you climbed to the roof of Rene's house?"



IV. THE KING'S TALE

"Yes," returned the king. "In a second I was there, followed by Tavannes, and then we clambered to a spot where I could see without being seen the interior of that devil's kitchen, in which I beheld extraordinary things which inspired me to take certain measures. Did you ever notice the end of the roof of that cursed perfumer? The windows toward the street are always closed and dark, except the last, from which can be seen the hotel de Soissons and the observatory which my mother built for that astrologer, Cosmo Ruggiero. Under the roof are lodging-rooms and a gallery which have no windows except on the courtyard, so that in order to see what was going on within, it was necessary to go where no man before ever dreamed of climbing,—along the coping of a high wall which adjoins the roof of Rene's house. The men who set up in that house the furnaces by which they distil death, reckoned on the cowardice of Parisians to save them from being overlooked; but they little thought of Charles de Valois! I crept along the coping until I came to a window, against the casing of which I was able to stand up straight with my arm round a carved monkey which ornamented it."

"What did you see, dear heart?" said Marie, trembling.

"A den, where works of darkness were being done," replied the king. "The first object on which my eyes lighted was a tall old man seated in a chair, with a magnificent white beard, like that of old l'Hopital, and dressed like him in a black velvet robe. On his broad forehead furrowed deep with wrinkles, on his crown of white hair, on his calm, attentive face, pale with toil and vigils, fell the concentrated rays of a lamp from which shone a vivid light. His attention was divided between an old manuscript, the parchment of which must have been centuries old, and two lighted furnaces on which heretical compounds were cooking. Neither the floor nor the ceiling of the laboratory could be seen, because of the myriads of hanging skeletons, bodies of animals, dried plants, minerals, and articles of all kinds that masked the walls; while on the floor were books, instruments for distilling, chests filled with utensils for magic and astrology; in one place I saw horoscopes and nativities, phials, wax-figures under spells, and possibly poisons. Tavannes and I were fascinated, I do assure you, by the sight of this devil's-arsenal. Only to see it puts one under a spell, and if I had not been King of France, I might have been awed by it. 'You can tremble for both of us,' I whispered to Tavannes. But Tavannes' eyes were already caught by the most mysterious feature of the scene. On a couch, near the old man, lay a girl of strangest beauty,—slender and long like a snake, white as ermine, livid as death, motionless as a statue. Perhaps it was a woman just taken from her grave, on whom they were trying experiments, for she seemed to wear a shroud; her eyes were fixed, and I could not see that she breathed. The old fellow paid no attention to her. I looked at him so intently that, after a while, his soul seemed to pass into mine. By dint of studying him, I ended by admiring the glance of his eye,—so keen, so profound, so bold, in spite of the chilling power of age. I admired his mouth, mobile with thoughts emanating from a desire which seemed to be the solitary desire of his soul, and was stamped upon every line of the face. All things in that man expressed a hope which nothing discouraged, and nothing could check. His attitude,—a quivering immovability,—those outlines so free, carved by a single passion as by the chisel of a sculptor, that IDEA concentrated on some experiment criminal or scientific, that seeking Mind in quest of Nature, thwarted by her, bending but never broken under the weight of its own audacity, which it would not renounce, threatening creation with the fire it derived from it,—ah! all that held me in a spell for the time being. I saw before me an old man who was more of a king than I, for his glance embraced the world and mastered it. I will forge swords no longer; I will soar above the abysses of existence, like that man; for his science, methinks, is true royalty! Yes, I believe in occult science."

"You, the eldest son, the defender of the Holy Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church?" said Marie.

"I."

"What happened to you? Go on, go on; I will fear for you, and you will have courage for me."

"Looking at a clock, the old man rose," continued the king. "He went out, I don't know where; but I heard the window on the side toward the rue Saint-Honore open. Soon a brilliant light gleamed out upon the darkness; then I saw in the observatory of the hotel de Soissons another light replying to that of the old man, and by it I beheld the figure of Cosmo Ruggiero on the tower. 'See, they communicate!' I said to Tavannes, who from that moment thought the matter frightfully suspicious, and agreed with me that we ought to seize the two men and search, incontinently, their accursed workshop. But before proceeding to do so, we wanted to see what was going to happen. After about fifteen minutes the door opened, and Cosmo Ruggiero, my mother's counsellor,—the bottomless pit which holds the secrets of the court, he from whom all women ask help against their husbands and lovers, and all the men ask help against their unfaithful wives and mistresses, he who traffics on the future as on the past, receiving pay with both hands, who sells horoscopes and is supposed to know all things,—that semi-devil came in, saying to the old man, 'Good-day to you, brother.' With him he brought a hideous old woman,—toothless, humpbacked, twisted, bent, like a Chinese image, only worse. She was wrinkled as a withered apple; her skin was saffron-colored; her chin bit her nose; her mouth was a mere line scarcely visible; her eyes were like the black spots on a dice; her forehead emitted bitterness; her hair escaped in straggling gray locks from a dirty coif; she walked with a crutch; she smelt of heresy and witchcraft. The sight of her actually frightened us, Tavannes and me! We didn't think her a natural woman. God never made a woman so fearful as that. She sat down on a stool near the pretty snake with whom Tavannes was in love. The two brothers paid no attention to the old woman nor to the young woman, who together made a horrible couple,—on the one side life in death, on the other death in life—"

"Ah! my sweet poet!" cried Marie, kissing the king.

"'Good-day, Cosmo,' replied the old alchemist. And they both looked into the furnace. 'What strength has the moon to-day?' asked the elder. 'But, caro Lorenzo,' replied my mother's astrologer, 'the September tides are not yet over; we can learn nothing while that disorder lasts.' 'What says the East to-night?' 'It discloses in the air a creative force which returns to earth all that earth takes from it. The conclusion is that all things here below are the product of a slow transformation, but that all diversities are the forms of one and the same substance.' 'That is what my predecessor thought,' replied Lorenzo. 'This morning Bernard Palissy told me that metals were the result of compression, and that fire, which divides all, also unites all; fire has the power to compress as well as to separate. That man has genius.' Though I was placed where it was impossible for them to see me, Cosmo said, lifting the hand of the dead girl: 'Some one is near us! Who is it' 'The king,' she answered. I at once showed myself and rapped on the window. Ruggiero opened it, and I sprang into that hellish kitchen, followed by Tavannes. 'Yes, the king,' I said to the two Florentines, who seemed terrified. 'In spite of your furnaces and your books, your sciences and your sorceries, you did not foresee my visit. I am very glad to meet the famous Lorenzo Ruggiero, of whom my mother speaks mysteriously,' I said, addressing the old man, who rose and bowed. 'You are in this kingdom without my consent, my good man. For whom are you working here, you whose ancestors from father to son have been devoted in heart to the house of Medici? Listen to me! You dive into so many purses that by this time, if you are grasping men, you have piled up gold. You are too shrewd and cautious to cast yourselves imprudently into criminal actions; but, nevertheless, you are not here in this kitchen without a purpose. Yes, you have some secret scheme, you who are satisfied neither by gold nor power. Whom do you serve,—God or the devil? What are you concocting here? I choose to know the whole truth; I am a man who can hear it and keep silence about your enterprise, however blamable it maybe. Therefore you will tell me all, without reserve. If you deceive me you will be treated severely. Pagans or Christians, Calvinists or Mohammedans, you have my royal word that you shall leave the kingdom in safety if you have any misdemeanors to relate. I shall leave you for the rest of the night and the forenoon of to-morrow to examine your thoughts; for you are now my prisoners, and you will at once follow me to a place where you will be guarded carefully.' Before obeying me the two Italians consulted each other by a subtle glance; then Lorenzo Ruggiero said I might be assured that no torture could wring their secrets from them; that in spite of their apparent feebleness neither pain nor human feelings had any power of them; confidence alone could make their mouth say what their mind contained. I must not, he said, be surprised if they treated as equals with a king who recognized God only as above him, for their thoughts came from God alone. They therefore claimed from me as much confidence and trust as they should give to me. But before engaging themselves to answer me without reserve they must request me to put my left hand into that of the young girl lying there, and my right into that of the old woman. Not wishing them to think I was afraid of their sorcery, I held out my hands; Lorenzo took the right, Cosmo the left, and each placed a hand in that of each woman, so that I was like Jesus Christ between the two thieves. During the time that the two witches were examining my hands Cosmo held a mirror before me and asked me to look into it; his brother, meanwhile, was talking with the two women in a language unknown to me. Neither Tavannes nor I could catch the meaning of a single sentence. Before bringing the men here we put seals on all the outlets of the laboratory, which Tavannes undertook to guard until such time as, by my express orders, Bernard Palissy, and Chapelain, my physician, could be brought there to examine thoroughly the drugs the place contained and which were evidently made there. In order to keep the Ruggieri ignorant of this search, and to prevent them from communicating with a single soul outside, I put the two devils in your lower rooms in charge of Solern's Germans, who are better than the walls of a jail. Rene, the perfumer, is kept under guard in his own house by Solern's equerry, and so are the two witches. Now, my sweetest, inasmuch as I hold the keys of the whole cabal,—the kings of Thune, the chiefs of sorcery, the gypsy fortune-tellers, the masters of the future, the heirs of all past soothsayers,—I intend by their means to read you, to know your heart; and, together, we will find out what is to happen to us."

"I shall be glad if they can lay my heart bare before you," said Marie, without the slightest fear.

"I know why sorcerers don't frighten you,—because you are a witch yourself."

"Will you have a peach?" she said, offering him some delicious fruit on a gold plate. "See these grapes, these pears; I went to Vincennes myself and gathered them for you."

"Yes, I'll eat them; there is no poison there except a philter from your hands."

"You ought to eat a great deal of fruit, Charles; it would cool your blood, which you heat by such excitements."

"Must I love you less?"

"Perhaps so," she said. "If the things you love injure you—and I have feared it—I shall find strength in my heart to refuse them. I adore Charles more than I love the king; I want the man to live, released from the tortures that make him grieve."

"Royalty has ruined me."

"Yes," she replied. "If you were only a poor prince, like your brother-in-law of Navarre, without a penny, possessing only a miserable little kingdom in Spain where he never sets his foot, and Bearn in France which doesn't give him revenue enough to feed him, I should be happy, much happier than if I were really Queen of France."

"But you are more than the Queen of France. She has King Charles for the sake of the kingdom only; royal marriages are only politics."

Marie smiled and made a pretty little grimace as she said: "Yes, yes, I know that, sire. And my sonnet, have you written it?"

"Dearest, verses are as difficult to write as treaties of peace; but you shall have them soon. Ah, me! life is so easy here, I wish I might never leave you. However, we must send for those Italians and question them. Tete-Dieu! I thought one Ruggiero in the kingdom was one too many, but it seems there are two. Now listen, my precious; you don't lack sense, you would make an excellent lieutenant of police, for you can penetrate things—"

"But, sire, we women suppose all we fear, and we turn what is probable into truths; that is the whole of our art in a nutshell."

"Well, help me to sound these men. Just now all my plans depend on the result of their examination. Are they innocent? Are they guilty? My mother is behind them."

"I hear Jacob's voice in the next room," said Marie.

Jacob was the favorite valet of the king, and the one who accompanied him on all his private excursions. He now came to ask if it was the king's good pleasure to speak to the two prisoners. The king made a sign in the affirmative, and the mistress of the house gave her orders.

"Jacob," she said, "clear the house of everybody, except the nurse and Monsieur le Dauphin d'Auvergne, who may remain. As for you, stay in the lower hall; but first, close the windows, draw the curtains of the salon, and light the candles."

The king's impatience was so great that while these preparations were being made he sat down upon a raised seat at the corner of a lofty fireplace of white marble in which a bright fire was blazing, placing his pretty mistress by his side. His portrait, framed in velvet, was over the mantle in place of a mirror. Charles IX. rested his elbow on the arm of the seat as if to watch the two Florentines the better under cover of his hand.

The shutters closed, and the curtains drawn, Jacob lighted the wax tapers in a tall candelabrum of chiselled silver, which he placed on the table where the Florentines were to stand,—an object, by the bye, which they would readily recognize as the work of their compatriot, Benvenuto Cellini. The richness of the room, decorated in the taste of Charles IX., now shone forth. The red-brown of the tapestries showed to better advantage than by daylight. The various articles of furniture, delicately made or carved, reflected in their ebony panels the glow of the fire and the sparkle of the lights. Gilding, soberly applied, shone here and there like eyes, brightening the brown color which prevailed in this nest of love.

Jacob presently gave two knocks, and, receiving permission, ushered in the Italians. Marie Touchet was instantly affected by the grandeur of Lorenzo's presence, which struck all those who met him, great and small alike. The silvery whiteness of the old man's beard was heightened by a robe of black velvet; his brow was like a marble dome. His austere face, illumined by two black eyes which cast a pointed flame, conveyed an impression of genius issuing from solitude, and all the more effective because its power had not been dulled by contact with men. It was like the steel of a blade that had never been fleshed.

As for Cosmo Ruggiero, he wore the dress of a courtier of the time. Marie made a sign to the king to assure him that he had not exaggerated his description, and to thank him for having shown her these extraordinary men.

"I would like to have seen the sorceresses, too," she whispered in his ear.



V. THE ALCHEMISTS

Again absorbed in thought, Charles IX. made her no answer; he was idly flicking crumbs of bread from his doublet and breeches.

"Your science cannot change the heavens or make the sun to shine, messieurs," he said at last, pointing to the curtains which the gray atmosphere of Paris darkened.

"Our science can make the skies what we like, sire," replied Lorenzo Ruggiero. "The weather is always fine for those who work in a laboratory by the light of a furnace."

"That is true," said the king. "Well, father," he added, using an expression familiar to him when addressing old men, "explain to us clearly the object of your studies."

"What will guarantee our safety?"

"The word of a king," replied Charles IX., whose curiosity was keenly excited by the question.

Lorenzo Ruggiero seemed to hesitate, and Charles IX. cried out: "What hinders you? We are here alone."

"But is the King of France here?" asked Lorenzo.

Charles reflected an instant, and then answered, "No."

The imposing old man then took a chair, and seated himself. Cosmo, astonished at this boldness, dared not imitate it.

Charles IX. remarked, with cutting sarcasm: "The king is not here, monsieur, but a lady is, whose permission it was your duty to await."

"He whom you see before you, madame," said the old man, "is as far above kings as kings are above their subjects; you will think me courteous when you know my powers."

Hearing these audacious words, with Italian emphasis, Charles and Marie looked at each other, and also at Cosmo, who, with his eyes fixed on his brother, seemed to be asking himself: "How does he intend to get us out of the danger in which we are?"

In fact, there was but one person present who could understand the boldness and the art of Lorenzo Ruggiero's first step; and that person was neither the king nor his young mistress, on whom that great seer had already flung the spell of his audacity,—it was Cosmo Ruggiero, his wily brother. Though superior himself to the ablest men at court, perhaps even to Catherine de' Medici herself, the astrologer always recognized his brother Lorenzo as his master.

Buried in studious solitude, the old savant weighed and estimated sovereigns, most of whom were worn out by the perpetual turmoil of politics, the crises of which at this period came so suddenly and were so keen, so intense, so unexpected. He knew their ennui, their lassitude, their disgust with things about them; he knew the ardor with which they sought what seemed to them new or strange or fantastic; above all, how they loved to enter some unknown intellectual region to escape their endless struggle with men and events. To those who have exhausted statecraft, nothing remains but the realm of pure thought. Charles the Fifth proved this by his abdication. Charles IX., who wrote sonnets and forged blades to escape the exhausting cares of an age in which both throne and king were threatened, to whom royalty had brought only cares and never pleasures, was likely to be roused to a high pitch of interest by the bold denial of his power thus uttered by Lorenzo. Religious doubt was not surprising in an age when Catholicism was so violently arraigned; but the upsetting of all religion, given as the basis of a strange, mysterious art, would surely strike the king's mind, and drag it from its present preoccupations. The essential thing for the two brothers was to make the king forget his suspicions by turning his mind to new ideas.

The Ruggieri were well aware that their stake in this game was their own life, and the glances, so humble, and yet so proud, which they exchanged with the searching, suspicious eyes of Marie and the king, were a scene in themselves.

"Sire," said Lorenzo Ruggiero, "you have asked me for the truth; but, to show the truth in all her nakedness, I must also show you and make you sound the depths of the well from which she comes. I appeal to the gentleman and the poet to pardon words which the eldest son of the Church might take for blasphemy,—I believe that God does not concern himself with human affairs."

Though determined to maintain a kingly composure, Charles IX. could not repress a motion of surprise.

"Without that conviction I should have no faith whatever in the miraculous work to which my life is devoted. To do that work I must have this belief; and if the finger of God guides all things, then—I am a madman. Therefore, let the king understand, once for all, that this work means a victory to be won over the present course of Nature. I am an alchemist, sire. But do not think, as the common-minded do, that I seek to make gold. The making of gold is not the object but an incident of our researches; otherwise our toil could not be called the GREAT WORK. The Great Work is something far loftier than that. If, therefore, I were forced to admit the presence of God in matter, my voice must logically command the extinction of furnaces kept burning throughout the ages. But to deny the direct action of God in the world is not to deny God; do not make that mistake. We place the Creator of all things far higher than the sphere to which religions have degraded Him. Do not accuse of atheism those who look for immortality. Like Lucifer, we are jealous of our God; and jealousy means love. Though the doctrine of which I speak is the basis of our work, all our disciples are not imbued with it. Cosmo," said the old man, pointing to his brother, "Cosmo is devout; he pays for masses for the repose of our father's soul, and he goes to hear them. Your mother's astrologer believes in the divinity of Christ, in the Immaculate Conception, in Transubstantiation; he believes also in the Pope's indulgences and in hell, and in a multitude of such things. His hour has not yet come. I have drawn his horoscope; he will live to be almost a centenarian; he will live through two more reigns, and he will see two kings of France assassinated."

"Who are they?" asked the king.

"The last of the Valois and the first of the Bourbons," replied Lorenzo. "But Cosmo shares my opinion. It is impossible to be an alchemist and a Catholic, to have faith in the despotism of man over matter, and also in the sovereignty of the divine."

"Cosmo to die a centenarian!" exclaimed the king, with his terrible frown of the eyebrows.

"Yes, sire," replied Lorenzo, with authority; "and he will die peaceably in his bed."

"If you have power to foresee the moment of your death, why are you ignorant of the outcome of your researches?" asked the king.

Charles IX. smiled as he said this, looking triumphantly at Marie Touchet. The brothers exchanged a rapid glance of satisfaction.

"He begins to be interested," thought they. "We are saved!"

"Our prognostics depend on the immediate relations which exist at the time between man and Nature; but our purpose itself is to change those relations entirely," replied Lorenzo.

The king was thoughtful.

"But, if you are certain of dying you are certain of defeat," he said, at last.

"Like our predecessors," replied Lorenzo, raising his hand and letting it fall again with an emphatic and solemn gesture, which presented visibly the grandeur of his thought. "But your mind has bounded to the confines of the matter, sire; we must return upon our steps. If you do not know the ground on which our edifice is built, you may well think it doomed to crumble with our lives, and so judge the Science cultivated from century to century by the greatest among men, as the common herd judge of it."

The king made a sign of assent.

"I think," continued Lorenzo, "that this earth belongs to man; he is the master of it, and he can appropriate to his use all forces and all substances. Man is not a creation issuing directly from the hand of God; but the development of a principle sown broadcast into the infinite of ether, from which millions of creatures are produced,—differing beings in different worlds, because the conditions surrounding life are varied. Yes, sire, the subtle element which we call life takes its rise beyond the visible worlds; creation divides that principle according to the centres into which it flows; and all beings, even the lowest, share it, taking so much as they can take of it at their own risk and peril. It is for them to protect themselves from death,—the whole purpose of alchemy lies there, sire. If man, the most perfect animal on this globe, bore within himself a portion of the divine, he would not die; but he does die. To solve this difficulty, Socrates and his school invented the Soul. I, the successor of so many great and unknown kings, the rulers of this science, I stand for the ancient theories, not the new. I believe in the transformations of matter which I see, and not in the possible eternity of a soul which I do not see. I do not recognize that world of the soul. If such a world existed, the substances whose magnificent conjunction produced your body, and are so dazzling in that of Madame, would not resolve themselves after your death each into its own element, water to water, fire to fire, metal to metal, just as the elements of my coal, when burned, return to their primitive molecules. If you believe that a certain part of us survives, we do not survive; for all that makes our actual being perishes. Now, it is this actual being that I am striving to continue beyond the limit assigned to life; it is our present transformation to which I wish to give a greater duration. Why! the trees live for centuries, but man lives only years, though the former are passive, the others active; the first motionless and speechless, the others gifted with language and motion. No created thing should be superior in this world to man, either in power or in duration. Already we are widening our perceptions, for we look into the stars; therefore we ought to be able to lengthen the duration of our lives. I place life before power. What good is power if life escapes us? A wise man should have no other purpose than to seek, not whether he has some other life within him, but the secret springs of his actual form, in order that he may prolong its existence at his will. That is the desire which has whitened my hair; but I walk boldly in the darkness, marshalling to the search all those great intellects that share my faith. Life will some day be ours,—ours to control."

"Ah! but how?" cried the king, rising hastily.

"The first condition of our faith being that the earth belongs to man, you must grant me that point," said Lorenzo.

"So be it!" said Charles de Valois, already under the spell.

"Then, sire, if we take God out of this world, what remains? Man. Let us therefore examine our domain. The material world is composed of elements; these elements are themselves principles; these principles resolve themselves into an ultimate principle, endowed with motion. The number THREE is the formula of creation: Matter, Motion, Product."

"Stop!" cried the king, "what proof is there of this?"

"Do you not see the effects?" replied Lorenzo. "We have tried in our crucibles the acorn which produces the oak, and the embryo from which grows a man; from this tiny substance results a single principle, to which some force, some movement must be given. Since there is no overruling creator, this principle must give to itself the outward forms which constitute our world—for this phenomenon of life is the same everywhere. Yes, for metals as for human beings, for plants as for men, life begins in an imperceptible embryo which develops itself. A primitive principle exists; let us seize it at the point where it begins to act upon itself, where it is a unit, where it is a principle before taking definite form, a cause before being an effect; we must see it single, without form, susceptible of clothing itself with all the outward forms we shall see it take. When we are face to face with this atomic particle, when we shall have caught its movement at the very instant of motion, then we shall know the law; thenceforth we are the masters of life, masters who can impose upon that principle the form we choose,—with gold to win the world, and the power to make for ourselves centuries of life in which to enjoy it! That is what my people and I are seeking. All our strength, all our thoughts are strained in that direction; nothing distracts us from it. One hour wasted on any other passion is a theft committed against our true grandeur. Just as you have never found your hounds relinquishing the hunted animal or failing to be in at the death, so I have never seen one of my patient disciples diverted from this great quest by the love of woman or a selfish thought. If an adept seeks power and wealth, the desire is instigated by our needs; he grasps treasure as a thirsty dog laps water while he swims a stream, because his crucibles are in need of a diamond to melt or an ingot of gold to reduce to powder. To each his own work. One seeks the secret of vegetable nature; he watches the slow life of plants; he notes the parity of motion among all the species, and the parity of their nutrition; he finds everywhere the need of sun and air and water, to fecundate and nourish them. Another scrutinizes the blood of animals. A third studies the laws of universal motion and its connection with celestial revolutions. Nearly all are eager to struggle with the intractable nature of metal, for while we find many principles in other things, we find all metals like unto themselves in every particular. Hence a common error as to our work. Behold these patient, indefatigable athletes, ever vanquished, yet ever returning to the combat! Humanity, sire, is behind us, as the huntsman is behind your hounds. She cries to us: 'Make haste! neglect nothing! sacrifice all, even a man, ye who sacrifice yourselves! Hasten! hasten! Beat down the arms of DEATH, mine enemy!' Yes, sire, we are inspired by a hope which involves the happiness of all coming generations. We have buried many men—and what men!—dying of this Search. Setting foot in this career we cannot work for ourselves; we may die without discovering the Secret; and our death is that of those who do not believe in another life; it is this life that we have sought, and failed to perpetuate. We are glorious martyrs; we have the welfare of the race at heart; we have failed but we live again in our successors. As we go through this existence we discover secrets with which we endow the liberal and the mechanical arts. From our furnaces gleam lights which illumine industrial enterprises, and perfect them. Gunpowder issued from our alembics; nay, we have mastered the lightning. In our persistent vigils lie political revolutions."

"Can this be true?" cried the king, springing once more from his chair.

"Why not?" said the grand-master of the new Templars. "Tradidit mundum disputationibus! God has given us the earth. Hear this once more: man is master here below; matter is his; all forces, all means are at his disposal. Who created us? Motion. What power maintains life in us? Motion. Why cannot science seize the secret of that motion? Nothing is lost here below; nothing escapes from our planet to go elsewhere,—otherwise the stars would stumble over each other; the waters of the deluge are still with us in their principle, and not a drop is lost. Around us, above us, beneath us, are to be found the elements from which have come innumerable hosts of men who have crowded the earth before and since the deluge. What is the secret of our struggle? To discover the force that disunites, and then, then we shall discover that which binds. We are the product of a visible manufacture. When the waters covered the globe men issued from them who found the elements of their life in the crust of the earth, in the air, and in the nourishment derived from them. Earth and air possess, therefore, the principle of human transformations; those transformations take place under our eyes, by means of that which is also under our eyes. We are able, therefore, to discover that secret,—not limiting the effort of the search to one man or to one age, but devoting humanity in its duration to it. We are engaged, hand to hand, in a struggle with Matter, into whose secret, I, the grand-master of our order, seek to penetrate. Christophe Columbus gave a world to the King of Spain; I seek an ever-living people for the King of France. Standing on the confines which separate us from a knowledge of material things, a patient observer of atoms, I destroy forms, I dissolve the bonds of combinations; I imitate death that I may learn how to imitate life. I strike incessantly at the door of creation, and I shall continue so to strike until the day of my death. When I am dead the knocker will pass into other hands equally persistent with those of the mighty men who handed it to me. Fabulous and uncomprehended beings, like Prometheus, Ixion, Adonis, Pan, and others, who have entered into the religious beliefs of all countries and all ages, prove to the world that the hopes we now embody were born with the human races. Chaldea, India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, the Moors, have transmitted from one to another Magic, the highest of all the occult sciences, which holds within it, as a precious deposit the fruits of the studies of each generation. In it lay the tie that bound the grand and majestic institution of the Templars. Sire, when one of your predecessors burned the Templars, he burned men only,—their Secret lived. The reconstruction of the Temple is a vow of an unknown nation, a race of daring seekers, whose faces are turned to the Orient of life,—all brothers, all inseparable, all united by one idea, and stamped with the mark of toil. I am the sovereign leader of that people, sovereign by election, not by birth. I guide them onward to a knowledge of the essence of life. Grand-master, Red-Cross-bearers, companions, adepts, we forever follow the imperceptible molecule which still escapes our eyes. But soon we shall make ourselves eyes more powerful than those which Nature has given us; we shall attain to a sight of the primitive atom, the corpuscular element so persistently sought by the wise and learned of all ages who have preceded us in the glorious search. Sire, when a man is astride of that abyss, when he commands bold divers like my disciples, all other human interests are as nothing. Therefore we are not dangerous. Religious disputes and political struggles are far away from us; we have passed beyond and above them. No man takes others by the throat when his whole strength is given to a struggle with Nature. Besides, in our science results are perceivable; we can measure effects and predict them; whereas all things are uncertain and vacillating in the struggles of men and their selfish interests. We decompose the diamond in our crucibles, and we shall make diamonds, we shall make gold! We shall impel vessels (as they have at Barcelona) with fire and a little water! We test the wind, and we shall make wind; we shall make light; we shall renew the face of empires with new industries! But we shall never debase ourselves to mount a throne to be crucified by the peoples!"

In spite of his strong determination not to be taken in by Italian wiles, the king, together with his gentle mistress, was already caught and snared by the ambiguous phrases and doublings of this pompous and humbugging loquacity. The eyes of the two lovers showed how their minds were dazzled by the mysterious riches of power thus displayed; they saw, as it were, a series of subterranean caverns filled with gnomes at their toil. The impatience of their curiosity put to flight all suspicion.

"But," cried the king, "if this be so, you are great statesmen who can enlighten us."

"No, sire," said Lorenzo, naively.

"Why not?" asked the king.

"Sire, it is not given to any man to foresee what will happen when thousands of men are gathered together. We can tell what one man will do, how long he will live, whether he will be happy or unhappy; but we cannot tell what a collection of wills may do; and to calculate the oscillations of their selfish interests is more difficult still, for interests are men plus things. We can, in solitude, see the future as a whole, and that is all. The Protestantism that now torments you will be destroyed in turn by its material consequences, which will turn to theories in due time. Europe is at the present moment getting the better of religion; to-morrow it will attack royalty."

"Then the Saint-Bartholomew was a great conception?"

"Yes, sire; for if the people triumph it will have a Saint-Bartholomew of its own. When religion and royalty are destroyed the people will attack the nobles; after the nobles, the rich. When Europe has become a mere troop of men without consistence or stability, because without leaders, it will fall a prey to brutal conquerors. Twenty times already has the world seen that sight, and Europe is now preparing to renew it. Ideas consume the ages as passions consume men. When man is cured, humanity may possibly cure itself. Science is the essence of humanity, and we are its pontiffs; whoso concerns himself about the essence cares little about the individual life."

"To what have you attained, so far?" asked the king.

"We advance slowly; but we lose nothing that we have won."

"Then you are the king of sorcerers?" retorted the king, piqued at being of no account in the presence of this man.

The majestic grand-master of the Rosicrucians cast a look on Charles IX. which withered him.

"You are the king of men," he said; "I am the king of ideas. If we were sorcerers, you would already have burned us. We have had our martyrs."

"But by what means are you able to cast nativities?" persisted the king. "How did you know that the man who came to your window last night was King of France? What power authorized one of you to tell my mother the fate of her three sons? Can you, grand-master of an art which claims to mould the world, can you tell me what my mother is planning at this moment?"

"Yes, sire."

This answer was given before Cosmo could pull his brother's robe to enjoin silence.

"Do you know why my brother, the King of Poland, has returned?"

"Yes, sire."

"Why?"

"To take your place."

"Our most cruel enemies are our nearest in blood!" exclaimed the king, violently, rising and walking about the room with hasty steps. "Kings have neither brothers, nor sons, nor mothers. Coligny was right; my murderers are not among the Huguenots, but in the Louvre. You are either imposters or regicides!—Jacob, call Solern."

"Sire," said Marie Touchet, "the Ruggieri have your word as a gentleman. You wanted to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; do not complain of its bitterness."

The king smiled, with an expression of bitter self-contempt; he thought his material royalty petty in presence of the august intellectual royalty of Lorenzo Ruggiero. Charles IX. knew that he could scarcely govern France, but this grand-master of Rosicrucians ruled a submissive and intelligent world.

"Answer me truthfully; I pledge my word as a gentleman that your answer, in case it confesses dreadful crimes, shall be as if it were never uttered," resumed the king. "Do you deal with poisons?"

"To discover that which gives life, we must also have full knowledge of that which kills."

"Do you possess the secret of many poisons?"

"Yes, sire,—in theory, but not in practice. We understand all poisons, but do not use them."

"Has my mother asked you for any?" said the king, breathlessly.

"Sire," replied Lorenzo, "Queen Catherine is too able a woman to employ such means. She knows that the sovereign who poisons dies by poison. The Borgias, also Bianca Capello, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, are noted examples of the dangers of that miserable resource. All things are known at courts; there can be no concealment. It may be possible to kill a poor devil—and what is the good of that?—but to aim at great men cannot be done secretly. Who shot Coligny? It could only be you, or the queen-mother, or the Guises. Not a soul is doubtful of that. Believe me, poison cannot be twice used with impunity in statecraft. Princes have successors. As for other men, if, like Luther, they are sovereigns through the power of ideas, their doctrines are not killed by killing them. The queen is from Florence; she knows that poison should never be used except as a weapon of personal revenge. My brother, who has not been parted from her since her arrival in France, knows the grief that Madame Diane caused your mother. But she never thought of poisoning her, though she might easily have done so. What could your father have said? Never had a woman a better right to do it; and she could have done it with impunity; but Madame de Valentinois still lives."

"But what of those waxen images?" asked the king.

"Sire," said Cosmo, "these things are so absolutely harmless that we lend ourselves to the practice to satisfy blind passions, just as physicians give bread pills to imaginary invalids. A disappointed woman fancies that by stabbing the heart of a wax-figure she has brought misfortunes upon the head of the man who has been unfaithful to her. What harm in that? Besides, it is our revenue."

"The Pope sells indulgences," said Lorenzo Ruggiero, smiling.

"Has my mother practised these spells with waxen images?"

"What good would such harmless means be to one who has the actual power to do all things?"

"Has Queen Catherine the power to save you at this moment?" inquired the king, in a threatening manner.

"Sire, we are not in any danger," replied Lorenzo, tranquilly. "I knew before I came into this house that I should leave it safely, just as I know that the king will be evilly disposed to my brother Cosmo a few weeks hence. My brother may run some danger then, but he will escape it. If the king reigns by the sword, he also reigns by justice," added the old man, alluding to the famous motto on a medal struck for Charles IX.

"You know all, and you know that I shall die soon, which is very well," said the king, hiding his anger under nervous impatience; "but how will my brother die,—he whom you say is to be Henri III.?"

"By a violent death."

"And the Duc d'Alencon?"

"He will not reign."

"Then Henri de Bourbon will be king of France?"

"Yes, sire."

"How will he die?"

"By a violent death."

"When I am dead what will become of madame?" asked the king, motioning to Marie Touchet.

"Madame de Belleville will marry, sire."

"You are imposters!" cried Marie Touchet. "Send them away, sire."

"Dearest, the Ruggieri have my word as a gentleman," replied the king, smiling. "Will madame have children?" he continued.

"Yes, sire; and madame will live to be more than eighty years old."

"Shall I order them to be hanged?" said the king to his mistress. "But about my son, the Comte d'Auvergne?" he continued, going into the next room to fetch the child.

"Why did you tell him I should marry?" said Marie to the two brothers, the moment they were alone.

"Madame," replied Lorenzo, with dignity, "the king bound us to tell the truth, and we have told it."

"Is that true?" she exclaimed.

"As true as it is that the governor of the city of Orleans is madly in love with you."

"But I do not love him," she cried.

"That is true, madame," replied Lorenzo; "but your horoscope declares that you will marry the man who is in love with you at the present time."

"Can you not lie a little for my sake?" she said smiling; "for if the king believes your predictions—"

"Is it not also necessary that he should believe our innocence?" interrupted Cosmo, with a wily glance at the young favorite. "The precautions taken against us by the king have made us think during the time we have spent in your charming jail that the occult sciences have been traduced to him."

"Do not feel uneasy," replied Marie. "I know him; his suspicions are at an end."

"We are innocent," said the grand-master of the Rosicrucians, proudly.

"So much the better for you," said Marie, "for your laboratory, and your retorts and phials are now being searched by order of the king."

The brothers looked at each other smiling. Marie Touchet took that smile for one of innocence, though it really signified: "Poor fools! can they suppose that if we brew poisons, we do not hide them?"

"Where are the king's searchers?"

"In Rene's laboratory," replied Marie.

Again the brothers glanced at each other with a look which said: "The hotel de Soissons is inviolable."

The king had so completely forgotten his suspicions that when, as he took his boy in his arms, Jacob gave him a note from Chapelain, he opened it with the certainty of finding in his physician's report that nothing had been discovered in the laboratory but what related exclusively to alchemy.

"Will he live a happy man?" asked the king, presenting his son to the two alchemists.

"That is a question which concerns Cosmo," replied Lorenzo, signing his brother.

Cosmo took the tiny hand of the child, and examined it carefully.

"Monsieur," said Charles IX. to the old man, "if you find it necessary to deny the existence of the soul in order to believe in the possibility of your enterprise, will you explain to my why you should doubt what your power does? Thought, which you seek to nullify, is the certainty, the torch which lights your researches. Ha! ha! is not that the motion of a spirit within you, while you deny such motion?" cried the king, pleased with his argument, and looking triumphantly at his mistress.

"Thought," replied Lorenzo Ruggiero, "is the exercise of an inward sense; just as the faculty of seeing several objects and noticing their size and color is an effect of sight. It has no connection with what people choose to call another life. Thought is a faculty which ceases, with the forces which produced it, when we cease to breathe."

"You are logical," said the king, surprised. "But alchemy must therefore be an atheistical science.'

"A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing. Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece by Pythagoras, one of the demigods of humanity. His doctrine of re-incarnation is the mathematics of materialism, the vital law of its phases. To each of the different creations which form the terrestrial creation belongs the power of retarding the movement which sweeps on the rest."

"Alchemy is the science of sciences!" cried Charles IX., enthusiastically. "I want to see you at work."

"Whenever it pleases you, sire; you cannot be more interested than Madame the Queen-mother."

"Ah! so this is why she cares for you?" exclaimed the king.

"The house of Medici has secretly protected our Search for more than a century."

"Sire," said Cosmo, "this child will live nearly a hundred years; he will have trials; nevertheless, he will be happy and honored, because he has in his veins the blood of the Valois."

"I will go and see you in your laboratory, messieurs," said the king, his good-humor quite restored. "You may now go."

The brothers bowed to Marie and to the king and then withdrew. They went down the steps of the portico gravely, without looking or speaking to each other; neither did they turn their faces to the windows as they crossed the courtyard, feeling sure that the king's eye watched them. But as they passed sideways out of the gate into the street they looked back and saw Charles IX. gazing after them from a window. When the alchemist and the astrologer were safely in the rue de l'Autruche, they cast their eyes before and behind them, to see if they were followed or overheard; then they continued their way to the moat of the Louvre without uttering a word. Once there, however, feeling themselves securely alone, Lorenzo said to Cosmo, in the Tuscan Italian of that day:—

"Affe d'Iddio! how we have fooled him!"

"Much good may it do him; let him make what he can of it!" said Cosmo. "We have given him a helping hand,—whether the queen pays it back to us or not."

Some days after this scene, which struck the king's mistress as forcibly as it did the king, Marie suddenly exclaimed, in one of those moments when the soul seems, as it were, disengaged from the body in the plenitude of happiness:—

"Charles, I understand Lorenzo Ruggiero; but did you observe that Cosmo said nothing?"

"True," said the king, struck by that sudden light. "After all, there was as much falsehood as truth in what they said. Those Italians are as supple as the silk they weave."

This suspicion explains the rancor which the king showed against Cosmo when the trial of La Mole and Coconnas took place a few weeks later. Finding him one of the agents of that conspiracy, he thought the Italians had tricked him; for it was proved that his mother's astrologer was not exclusively concerned with stars, the powder of projection, and the primitive atom. Lorenzo had by that time left the kingdom.

In spite of the incredulity which most persons show in these matters, the events which followed the scene we have narrated confirmed the predictions of the Ruggieri.

The king died within three months.

Charles de Gondi followed Charles IX. to the grave, as had been foretold to him jestingly by his brother the Marechal de Retz, a friend of the Ruggieri, who believed in their predictions.

Marie Touchet married Charles de Balzac, Marquis d'Entragues, the governor of Orleans, by whom she had two daughters. The most celebrated of these daughters, the half-sister of the Comte d'Auvergne, was the mistress of Henri IV., and it was she who endeavored, at the time of Biron's conspiracy, to put her brother on the throne of France by driving out the Bourbons.

The Comte d'Auvergne, who became the Duc d'Angouleme, lived into the reign of Louis XIV. He coined money on his estates and altered the inscriptions; but Louis XIV. let him do as he pleased, out of respect for the blood of the Valois.

Cosmo Ruggiero lived till the middle of the reign of Louis XIII.; he witnessed the fall of the house of the Medici in France, also that of the Concini. History has taken pains to record that he died an atheist, that is, a materialist.

The Marquise d'Entragues was over eighty when she died.

The famous Comte de Saint-Germain, who made so much noise under Louis XIV., was a pupil of Lorenzo and Cosmo Ruggiero. This celebrated alchemist lived to be one hundred and thirty years old,—an age which some biographers give to Marion de Lorme. He must have heard from the Ruggieri the various incidents of the Saint-Bartholomew and of the reigns of the Valois kings, which he afterwards recounted in the first person singular, as though he had played a part in them. The Comte de Saint-Germain was the last of the alchemists who knew how to clearly explain their science; but he left no writings. The cabalistic doctrine presented in this Study is that taught by this mysterious personage.

And here, behold a strange thing! Three lives, that of the old man from whom I have obtained these facts, that of the Comte de Saint-Germain, and that of Cosmo Ruggiero, suffice to cover the whole of European history from Francois I. to Napoleon! Only fifty such lives are needed to reach back to the first known period of the world. "What are fifty generations for the study of the mysteries of life?" said the Comte de Saint-Germain.



PART III



I. TWO DREAMS

In 1786 Bodard de Saint-James, treasurer of the navy, excited more attention and gossip as to his luxury than any other financier in Paris. At this period he was building his famous "Folie" at Neuilly, and his wife had just bought a set of feathers to crown the tester of her bed, the price of which had been too great for even the queen to pay.

Bodard owned the magnificent mansion in the place Vendome, which the fermier-general, Dange, had lately been forced to leave. That celebrated epicurean was now dead, and on the day of his interment his intimate friend, Monsieur de Bievre, raised a laugh by saying that he "could now pass through the place Vendome without danger." This allusion to the hellish gambling which went on in the dead man's house, was his only funeral oration. The house is opposite to the Chancellerie.

To end in a few words the history of Bodard,—he became a poor man, having failed for fourteen millions after the bankruptcy of the Prince de Guemenee. The stupidity he showed in not anticipating that "serenissime disaster," to use the expression of Lebrun Pindare, was the reason why no notice was taken of his misfortunes. He died, like Bourvalais, Bouret, and so many others, in a garret.

Madame Bodard de Saint-James was ambitious, and professed to receive none but persons of quality at her house,—an old absurdity which is ever new. To her thinking, even the parliamentary judges were of small account; she wished for titled persons in her salons, or at all events, those who had the right of entrance at court. To say that many cordons bleus were seen at her house would be false; but it is quite certain that she managed to obtain the good-will and civilities of several members of the house of Rohan, as was proved later in the affair of the too celebrated diamond necklace.

One evening—it was, I think, in August, 1786—I was much surprised to meet in the salons of this lady, so exacting in the matter of gentility, two new faces which struck me as belonging to men of inferior social position. She came to me presently in the embrasure of a window where I had ensconced myself.

"Tell me," I said to her, with a glance toward one of the new-comers, "who and what is that queer species? Why do you have that kind of thing here?"

"He is charming."

"Do you see him through a prism of love, or am I blind?"

"You are not blind," she said, laughing. "The man is as ugly as a caterpillar; but he has done me the most immense service a woman can receive from a man."

As I looked at her rather maliciously she hastened to add: "He's a physician, and he has completely cured me of those odious red blotches which spoiled my complexion and made me look like a peasant woman."

I shrugged my shoulders with disgust.

"He is a charlatan."

"No," she said, "he is the surgeon of the court pages. He has a fine intellect, I assure you; in fact, he is a writer, and a very learned man."

"Heavens! if his style resembles his face!" I said scoffingly. "But who is the other?"

"What other?"

"That spruce, affected little popinjay over there, who looks as if he had been drinking verjuice."

"He is a rather well-born man," she replied; "just arrived from some province, I forget which—oh! from Artois. He is sent here to conclude an affair in which the Cardinal de Rohan is interested, and his Eminence in person had just presented him to Monsieur de Saint-James. It seems they have both chosen my husband as arbitrator. The provincial didn't show his wisdom in that; but fancy what simpletons the people who sent him here must be to trust a case to a man of his sort! He is as meek as a sheep and as timid as a girl. His Eminence is very kind to him."

"What is the nature of the affair?"

"Oh! a question of three hundred thousand francs."

"Then the man is a lawyer?" I said, with a slight shrug.

"Yes," she replied.

Somewhat confused by this humiliating avowal, Madame Bodard returned to her place at a faro-table.

All the tables were full. I had nothing to do, no one to speak to, and I had just lost two thousand crowns to Monsieur de Laval. I flung myself on a sofa near the fireplace. Presently, if there was ever a man on earth most utterly astonished it was I, when, on looking up, I saw, seated on another sofa on the opposite side of the fireplace, Monsieur de Calonne, the comptroller-general. He seemed to be dozing, or else he was buried in one of those deep meditations which overtake statesmen. When I pointed out the famous minister to Beaumarchais, who happened to come near me at that moment, the father of Figaro explained the mystery of his presence in that house without uttering a word. He pointed first at my head, then at Bodard's with a malicious gesture which consisted in turning to each of us two fingers of his hand while he kept the others doubled up. My first impulse was to rise and say something rousing to Calonne; then I paused, first, because I thought of a trick I could play the statesman, and secondly, because Beaumarchais caught me familiarly by the hand.

"Why do you do that, monsieur?" I said.

He winked at the comptroller.

"Don't wake him," he said in a low voice. "A man is happy when asleep."

"Pray, is sleep a financial scheme?" I whispered.

"Indeed, yes!" said Calonne, who had guessed our words from the mere motion of our lips. "Would to God we could sleep long, and then the awakening you are about to see would never happen."

"Monseigneur," said the dramatist, "I must thank you—"

"For what?"

"Monsieur de Mirabeau has started for Berlin. I don't know whether we might not both have drowned ourselves in that affair of 'les Eaux.'"

"You have too much memory, and too little gratitude," replied the minister, annoyed at having one of his secrets divulged in my presence.

"Possibly," said Beaumarchais, cut to the quick; "but I have millions that can balance many a score."

Calonne pretended not to hear.

It was long past midnight when the play ceased. Supper was announced. There were ten of us at table: Bodard and his wife, Calonne, Beaumarchais, the two strange men, two pretty women, whose names I will not give here, a fermier-general, Lavoisier, and myself. Out of thirty guests who were in the salon when I entered it, only these ten remained. The two queer species did not consent to stay until they were urged to do so by Madame Bodard, who probably thought she was paying her obligations to the surgeon by giving him something to eat, and pleasing her husband (with whom she appeared, I don't precisely know why, to be coquetting) by inviting the lawyer.

The supper began by being frightfully dull. The two strangers and the fermier-general oppressed us. I made a sign to Beaumarchais to intoxicate the son of Esculapius, who sat on his right, giving him to understand that I would do the same by the lawyer, who was next to me. As there seemed no other way to amuse ourselves, and it offered a chance to draw out the two men, who were already sufficiently singular, Monsieur de Calonne smiled at our project. The ladies present also shared in the bacchanal conspiracy, and the wine of Sillery crowned our glasses again and again with its silvery foam. The surgeon was easily managed; but at the second glass which I offered to my neighbor the lawyer, he told me with the frigid politeness of a usurer that he should drink no more.

At this instant Madame de Saint-James chanced to introduce, I scarcely know how, the topic of the marvellous suppers to the Comte de Cagliostro, given by the Cardinal de Rohan. My mind was not very attentive to what the mistress of the house was saying, because I was watching with extreme curiosity the pinched and livid face of my little neighbor, whose principal feature was a turned-up and at the same time pointed nose, which made him, at times, look very like a weasel. Suddenly his cheeks flushed as he caught the words of a dispute between Madame de Saint-James and Monsieur de Calonne.

"But I assure you, monsieur," she was saying, with an imperious air, "that I saw Cleopatra, the queen."

"I can believe it, madame," said my neighbor, "for I myself have spoken to Catherine de' Medici."

"Oh! oh!" exclaimed Monsieur de Calonne.

The words uttered by the little provincial were said in a voice of strange sonorousness, if I may be permitted to borrow that expression from the science of physics. This sudden clearness of intonation, coming from a man who had hitherto scarcely spoken, and then in a low and modulated tone, surprised all present exceedingly.

"Why, he is talking!" said the surgeon, who was now in a satisfactory state of drunkenness, addressing Beaumarchais.

"His neighbor must have pulled his wires," replied the satirist.

My man flushed again as he overheard the words, though they were said in a low voice.

"And pray, how was the late queen?" asked Calonne, jestingly.

"I will not swear that the person with whom I supped last night at the house of the Cardinal de Rohan was Catherine de' Medici in person. That miracle would justly seem impossible to Christians as well as to philosophers," said the little lawyer, resting the tips of his fingers on the table, and leaning back in his chair as if preparing to make a speech. "Nevertheless, I do assert that the woman I saw resembled Catherine de' Medici as closely as though they were twin-sisters. She was dressed in a black velvet gown, precisely like that of the queen in the well-known portrait which belongs to the king; on her head was the pointed velvet coif, which is characteristic of her; and she had the wan complexion, and the features we all know well. I could not help betraying my surprise to his Eminence. The suddenness of the evocation seemed to me all the more amazing because Monsieur de Cagliostro had been unable to divine the name of the person with whom I wished to communicate. I was confounded. The magical spectacle of a supper, where one of the illustrious women of past times presented herself, took from me my presence of mind. I listened without daring to question. When I roused myself about midnight from the spell of that magic, I was inclined to doubt my senses. But even this great marvel seemed natural in comparison with the singular hallucination to which I was presently subjected. I don't know in what words I can describe to you the state of my senses. But I declare, in the sincerity of my heart, I no longer wonder that souls have been found weak enough, or strong enough, to believe in the mysteries of magic and in the power of demons. For myself, until I am better informed, I regard as possible the apparitions which Cardan and other thaumaturgists describe."

These words, said with indescribable eloquence of tone, were of a nature to rouse the curiosity of all present. We looked at the speaker and kept silence; our eyes alone betrayed our interest, their pupils reflecting the light of the wax-candles in the sconces. By dint of observing this unknown little man, I fancied I could see the pores of his skin, especially those of his forehead, emitting an inward sentiment with which he was saturated. This man, apparently so cold and formal, seemed to contain within him a burning altar, the flames of which beat down upon us.

"I do not know," he continued, "if the Figure evoked followed me invisibly, but no sooner had my head touched the pillow in my own chamber than I saw once more that grand Shade of Catherine rise before me. I felt myself, instinctively, in a luminous sphere, and my eyes, fastened upon the queen with intolerable fixity, saw naught but her. Suddenly, she bent toward me."

At these words the ladies present made a unanimous movement of curiosity.

"But," continued the lawyer, "I am not sure that I ought to relate what happened, for though I am inclined to believe it was all a dream, it concerns grave matters.

"Of religion?" asked Beaumarchais.

"If there is any impropriety," remarked Calonne, "these ladies will excuse it."

"It relates to the government," replied the lawyer.

"Go on, then," said the minister; "Voltaire, Diderot, and their fellows have already begun to tutor us on that subject."

Calonne became very attentive, and his neighbor, Madame de Genlis, rather anxious. The little provincial still hesitated, and Beaumarchais said to him somewhat roughly:—

"Go on, maitre, go on! Don't you know that when the laws allow but little liberty the people seek their freedom in their morals?"

Thus adjured, the small man told his tale:—

"Whether it was that certain ideas were fermenting in my brain, or that some strange power impelled me, I said to her: 'Ah! madame, you committed a very great crime.' 'What crime?' she asked in a grave voice. 'The crime for which the signal was given from the clock of the palace on the 24th of August,' I answered. She smiled disdainfully, and a few deep wrinkles appeared on her pallid cheeks. 'You call that a crime which was only a misfortune,' she said. 'The enterprise, being ill-managed, failed; the benefit we expected for France, for Europe, for the Catholic Church was lost. Impossible to foresee that. Our orders were ill executed; we did not find as many Montlucs as we needed. Posterity will not hold us responsible for the failure of communications, which deprived our work of the unity of movement which is essential to all great strokes of policy; that was our misfortune! If on the 25th of August not the shadow of a Huguenot had been left in France, I should go down to the uttermost posterity as a noble image of Providence. How many, many times have the clear-sighted souls of Sixtus the Fifth, Richelieu, Bossuet, reproached me secretly for having failed in that enterprise after having the boldness to conceive it! How many and deep regrets for that failure attended my deathbed! Thirty years after the Saint-Bartholomew the evil it might have cured was still in existence. That failure caused ten times more blood to flow in France than if the massacre of August 24th had been completed on the 26th. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in honor of which you have struck medals, has cost more tears, more blood, more money, and killed the prosperity of France far more than three Saint-Bartholomews. Letellier with his pen gave effect to a decree which the throne had secretly promulgated since my time; but, though the vast execution was necessary of the 25th of August, 1572, on the 25th of August, 1685, it was useless. Under the second son of Henri de Valois heresy had scarcely conceived an offspring; under the second son of Henri de Bourbon that teeming mother had cast her spawn over the whole universe. You accuse me of a crime, and you put up statues to the son of Anne of Austria! Nevertheless, he and I attempted the same thing; he succeeded, I failed; but Louis XIV. found the Protestants without arms, whereas in my reign they had powerful armies, statesmen, warriors, and all Germany on their side.' At these words, slowly uttered, I felt an inward shudder pass through me. I fancied I breathed the fumes of blood from I know not what great mass of victims. Catherine was magnified. She stood before me like an evil genius; she sought, it seemed to me, to enter my consciousness and abide there."

"He dreamed all that," whispered Beaumarchais; "he certainly never invented it."

"'My reason is bewildered,' I said to the queen. 'You praise yourself for an act which three generations of men have condemned, stigmatized, and—' 'Add,' she rejoined, 'that historians have been more unjust toward me than my contemporaries. None have defended me. I, rich and all-powerful, am accused of ambition! I am taxed with cruelty,—I who have but two deaths upon my conscience. Even to impartial minds I am still a problem. Do you believe that I was actuated by hatred, that vengeance and fury were the breath of my nostrils?' She smiled with pity. 'No,' she continued, 'I was cold and calm as reason itself. I condemned the Huguenots without pity, but without passion; they were the rotten fruit in my basket and I cast them out. Had I been Queen of England, I should have treated seditious Catholics in the same way. The life of our power in those days depended on their being but one God, one Faith, one Master in the State. Happily for me, I uttered my justification in one sentence which history is transmitting. When Birago falsely announced to me the loss of the battle of Dreux, I answered: "Well then; we will go to the Protestant churches." Did I hate the reformers? No, I esteemed them much, and I knew them little. If I felt any aversion to the politicians of my time, it was to that base Cardinal de Lorraine, and to his brother the shrewd and brutal soldier who spied upon my every act. They were the real enemies of my children; they sought to snatch the crown; I saw them daily at work and they wore me out. If we had not ordered the Saint-Bartholomew, the Guises would have done the same thing by the help of Rome and the monks. The League, which was powerful only in consequence of my old age, would have begun in 1573.' 'But, madame, instead of ordering that horrible murder (pardon my plainness) why not have employed the vast resources of your political power in giving to the Reformers those wise institutions which made the reign of Henri IV. so glorious and so peaceful?' She smiled again and shrugged her shoulders, the hollow wrinkles of her pallid face giving her an expression of the bitterest sarcasm. 'The peoples,' she said, 'need periods of rest after savage feuds; there lies the secret of that reign. But Henri IV. committed two irreparable blunders. He ought neither to have abjured Protestantism, nor, after becoming a Catholic himself, should he have left France Catholic. He, alone, was in a position to have changed the whole of France without a jar. Either not a stole, or not a conventicle—that should have been his motto. To leave two bitter enemies, two antagonistic principles in a government with nothing to balance them, that is the crime of kings; it is thus that they sow revolutions. To God alone belongs the right to keep good and evil perpetually together in his work. But it may be,' she said reflectively, 'that that sentence was inscribed on the foundation of Henri IV.'s policy, and it may have caused his death. It is impossible that Sully did not cast covetous eyes on the vast wealth of the clergy,—which the clergy did not possess in peace, for the nobles robbed them of at least two-thirds of their revenue. Sully, the Reformer, himself owned abbeys.' She paused, and appeared to reflect. 'But,' she resumed, 'remember you are asking the niece of a Pope to justify her Catholicism.' She stopped again. 'And yet, after all,' she added with a gesture of some levity, 'I should have made a good Calvinist! Do the wise men of your century still think that religion had anything to do with that struggle, the greatest which Europe has ever seen?—a vast revolution, retarded by little causes which, however, will not be prevented from overwhelming the world because I failed to smother it; a revolution,' she said, giving me a solemn look, 'which is still advancing, and which you might consummate. Yes, you, who hear me!' I shuddered. 'What! has no one yet understood that the old interests and the new interests seized Rome and Luther as mere banners? What! do they not know Louis IX., to escape just such a struggle, dragged a population a hundredfold more in number than I destroyed from their homes and left their bones on the sands of Egypt, for which he was made a saint? while I—But I,' she added, 'failed.' She bowed her head and was silent for some moments. I no longer beheld a queen, but rather one of those ancient druidesses to whom human lives are sacrificed; who unroll the pages of the future and exhume the teachings of the past. But soon she uplifted her regal and majestic form. 'Luther and Calvin,' she said, 'by calling the attention of the burghers to the abuses of the Roman Church, gave birth in Europe to a spirit of investigation which was certain to lead the peoples to examine all things. Examination leads to doubt. Instead of faith, which is necessary to all societies, those two men drew after them, in the far distance, a strange philosophy, armed with hammers, hungry for destruction. Science sprang, sparkling with her specious lights, from the bosom of heresy. It was far less a question of reforming a Church than of winning indefinite liberty for man—which is the death of power. I saw that. The consequence of the successes won by the religionists in their struggle against the priesthood (already better armed and more formidable than the Crown) was the destruction of the monarchical power raised by Louis IX. at such vast cost upon the ruins of feudality. It involved, in fact, nothing less than the annihilation of religion and royalty, on the ruins of which the whole burgher class of Europe meant to stand. The struggle was therefore war without quarter between the new ideas and the law,—that is, the old beliefs. The Catholics were the emblem of the material interests of royalty, of the great lords, and of the clergy. It was a duel to the death between two giants; unfortunately, the Saint-Bartholomew proved to be only a wound. Remember this: because a few drops of blood were spared at that opportune moment, torrents were compelled to flow at a later period. The intellect which soars above a nation cannot escape a great misfortune; I mean the misfortune of finding no equals capable of judging it when it succumbs beneath the weight of untoward events. My equals are few; fools are in the majority: that statement explains it all. If my name is execrated in France, the fault lies with the commonplace minds who form the mass of all generations. In the great crises through which I passed, the duty of reigning was not the mere giving of audiences, reviewing of troops, signing of decrees. I may have committed mistakes, for I was but a woman. But why was there then no man who rose above his age? The Duke of Alba had a soul of iron; Philip II. was stupefied by Catholic belief; Henri IV. was a gambling soldier and a libertine; the Admiral, a stubborn mule. Louis XI. lived too soon, Richelieu too late. Virtuous or criminal, guilty or not in the Saint-Bartholomew, I accept the onus of it; I stand between those two great men,—the visible link of an unseen chain. The day will come when some paradoxical writer will ask if the peoples have not bestowed the title of executioner among their victims. It will not be the first time that humanity has preferred to immolate a god rather than admit its own guilt. You are shedding upon two hundred clowns, sacrificed for a purpose, the tears you refuse to a generation, a century, a world! You forget that political liberty, the tranquillity of a nation, nay, knowledge itself, are gifts on which destiny has laid a tax of blood!' 'But,' I exclaimed, with tears in my eyes, 'will the nations never be happy at less cost?' 'Truth never leaves her well but to bathe in the blood which refreshes her,' she replied. 'Christianity, itself the essence of all truth, since it comes from God, was fed by the blood of martyrs, which flowed in torrents; and shall it not ever flow? You will learn this, you who are destined to be one of the builders of the social edifice founded by the Apostles. So long as you level heads you will be applauded, but take your trowel in hand, begin to reconstruct, and your fellows will kill you.' Blood! blood! the word sounded in my ears like a knell. 'According to you,' I cried, 'Protestantism has the right to reason as you do!' But Catherine had disappeared, as if some puff of air had suddenly extinguished the supernatural light which enabled my mind to see that Figure whose proportions had gradually become gigantic. And then, without warning, I found within me a portion of myself which adopted the monstrous doctrine delivered by the Italian. I woke, weeping, bathed in sweat, at the moment when my reason told me firmly, in a gentle voice, that neither kings nor nations had the right to apply such principles, fit only for a world of atheists."

"How would you save a falling monarchy?" asked Beaumarchais.

"God is present," replied the little lawyer.

"Therefore," remarked Monsieur de Calonne, with the inconceivable levity which characterized him, "we have the agreeable resource of believing ourselves the instruments of God, according to the Gospel of Bossuet."

As soon as the ladies discovered that the tale related only to a conversation between the queen and the lawyer, they had begun to whisper and to show signs of impatience,—interjecting, now and then, little phrases through his speech. "How wearisome he is!" "My dear, when will he finish?" were among those which reached my ear.

When the strange little man had ceased speaking the ladies too were silent; Monsieur Bodard was sound asleep; the surgeon, half drunk; Monsieur de Calonne was smiling at the lady next him. Lavoisier, Beaumarchais, and I alone had listened to the lawyer's dream. The silence at this moment had something solemn about it. The gleam of the candles seemed to me magical. A sentiment bound all three of us by some mysterious tie to that singular little man, who made me, strange to say, conceive, suddenly, the inexplicable influences of fanaticism. Nothing less than the hollow, cavernous voice of Beaumarchais's neighbor, the surgeon, could, I think, have roused me.

"I, too, have dreamed," he said.

I looked at him more attentively, and a feeling of some strange horror came over me. His livid skin, his features, huge and yet ignoble, gave an exact idea of what you must allow me to call the scum of the earth. A few bluish-black spots were scattered over his face, like bits of mud, and his eyes shot forth an evil gleam. The face seemed, perhaps, darker, more lowering than it was, because of the white hair piled like hoarfrost on his head.

"That man must have buried many a patient," I whispered to my neighbor the lawyer.

"I wouldn't trust him with my dog," he answered.

"I hate him involuntarily."

"For my part, I despise him."

"Perhaps we are unjust," I remarked.

"Ha! to-morrow he may be as famous as Volange the actor."

Monsieur de Calonne here motioned us to look at the surgeon, with a gesture that seemed to say: "I think he'll be very amusing."

"Did you dream of a queen?" asked Beaumarchais.

"No, I dreamed of a People," replied the surgeon, with an emphasis which made us laugh. "I was then in charge of a patient whose leg I was to amputate the next day—"

"Did you find the People in the leg of your patient?" asked Monsieur de Calonne.

"Precisely," replied the surgeon.

"How amusing!" cried Madame de Genlis.

"I was somewhat surprised," went on the speaker, without noticing the interruption, and sticking his hands into the gussets of his breeches, "to hear something talking to me within that leg. I then found I had the singular faculty of entering the being of my patient. Once within his skin I saw a marvellous number of little creatures which moved, and thought, and reasoned. Some of them lived in the body of the man, others lived in his mind. His ideas were things which were born, and grew, and died; they were sick and well, and gay, and sad; they all had special countenances; they fought with each other, or they embraced each other. Some ideas sprang forth and went to live in the world of intellect. I began to see that there were two worlds, two universes,—the visible universe, and the invisible universe; that the earth had, like man, a body and a soul. Nature illumined herself for me; I felt her immensity when I saw the oceans of beings who, in masses and in species, spread everywhere, making one sole and uniform animated Matter, from the stone of the earth to God. Magnificent vision! In short, I found a universe within my patient. When I inserted my knife into his gangrened leg I cut into a million of those little beings. Oh! you laugh, madame; let me tell you that you are eaten up by such creatures—"

"No personalities!" interposed Monsieur de Calonne. "Speak for yourself and for your patient."

"My patient, frightened by the cries of his animalcules, wanted to stop the operation; but I went on regardless of his remonstrances; telling him that those evil animals were already gnawing at his bones. He made a sudden movement of resistance, not understanding that what I did was for his good, and my knife slipped aside, entered my own body, and—"

"He is stupid," said Lavoisier.

"No, he is drunk," replied Beaumarchais.

"But, gentlemen, my dream has a meaning," cried the surgeon.

"Oh! oh!" exclaimed Bodard, waking up; "my leg is asleep!"

THE END