CHAPTER V
The Royal Palace of Turin, situated off the Piazza Castello, in the east, or distinguished quarter of the city, epitomised in itself the policy of the Savoyard rule. Externally it was as unpretentious a pile as any brick-built factory—or, shall we say, for the sake of apt analogy, as our own original South Kensington Museum. For, in like manner with that illustrious emporium, did the utilitarian face which it turned to the street afford no clue whatever to its inner meaning. It was just a countenance dressed for the demos—a sop of unostentation offered to that triple-headed sleuth-hound.
It was certainly unelating as an architectural composition; but then we know, by the story, that the plain pear is often the most luscious. Beauty, saith the sage (a plain fellow himself, no doubt), is but skin-deep. That is an aphorism as untrue as many another. But, take it for what it is worth, and ugliness, by the like measure, is also skin-deep.
The Palazzo Reale, at least, was, like its later South Kensington parallel, a very museum of treasures contained within a mean casket. They were of all sorts, from a Benvenuto salver, or a suit of mail worn by an enormous armiger at the battle of Pavia, to the individual “kit” of M. Dupré, who had been “le Dieu de la danse” in the supreme days of Turin’s gaiety. Those, perhaps, were fled for ever, as a characteristic and prerogative of “privilege”; but their reactionary spirit lingered on, awaiting revitalisation in the dumb strings of the great dancer’s fiddle.
I am not sure but that the present representative of the house did not hold this instrument among the first of his treasures. It symbolised for him his beautiful ideal of humanity frolicking in an Arcadian estate. Watteau, Gillot, and the fête galante were always figured in the dim backgrounds of his policy. He yearned to educate democracy with a harpsichord, and pelt it into silence with roses. He was not altogether a bad little fellow, for his fifty-seven years, only his ideals were expensive, and of course supremely unpractical. While seeing very clearly that Arcadia was only to be reached through education (he endowed and encouraged learning quite handsomely), he stultified all the effects of his liberality by conceding to hereditary prejudice the whole conduct of his government. He did not walk with the world, in fact, and so it walked into him.
The Palace, in the meanwhile, was as sumptuous within as it was bare without. Mr Trix, entering towards it, one fine September morning, by the gates opening from the Piazzo Castello, tasted, in some curious anticipation, the possible flavour of the fruit hidden behind that uncompromising rind. He was “waiting,” by private “command,” on his sovereign, and the occasion (the first of its kind to him) found him by no means so possessed by its importance as that his self-possession was moved thereby to yield an iota of its serenity. He was received, with consideration, at a private door to which he was directed, and, after the slightest delay, ushered straight into the presence of Victor-Amadeus.
The monarch was seated at a secretaire, heavily gilt and with painted panels, talking or dictating to a little fat, bedizened aide-de-camp, who wrote apart at a littered table, and who was so buried in bullion that he might have been taken for the First Lord of the Treasury just emerged from a dip into one of its coffers. The royal toilet itself was a négligé—dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and bare close-cropped head—all very gimp and finical. Shrewd, wizened, narrow, Victor-Amadeus’s face—a dough-white, flexuous-nosed, long-chinned, under-jawed little affair—perked up from its collar of white ermine like a beedy-eyed condor’s. Thought was engraved on it in a number of thready wrinkles, like cracks in parchment. The deepest owed themselves to profound self-searchings on such questions as the conduct of Court precedents, of royal hunts, of ceremonial and pageantry. The slightest might record some difficult moments accorded to the size of a button, or the claims of the subversive shoe-tie over the constitutional buckle, To find the royal countenance simply vacant was to know the royal mind concentrated on affairs of State.
Those might include the potentialities of the Lottery, the friendship of Cousin Louis of France, a new uniform for the army. It is certain that they never excluded the necessity of some new drain upon the exchequer. Victor-Amadeus recognised very clearly that the true evolution of man is in his clothes. And he was right in a way. It seems impossible to advocate even so much, or so little, as a return to Nature without wanting to dress up to the part. He was a petit-mâitre, in short, of the first rank and the most fastidious taste, who had spent his reigning life in offering himself a leading example of refinement to his subjects. He was something better than a benevolent Caligula.
He went on dictating now, while Mr Trix, standing just within the doorway by which he had entered, awaited passively his royal pleasure.
“Write, my dear Polisson,” said the King, “that, as regards the Pont Beauvoisin over the Guier, we cannot consent to the abolition of the double toll. To leave Savoy may be a necessity; to enter France may be necessity; but two necessities do not make one privilege. On the other hand, two privileges make a certain necessity—that of paying for both.”
The gilded scribe raised his head and little screw-eyes. M. Polisson was terribly short-sighted, but was forbidden the use of spectacles because of their ugliness.
“I must recall to your Majesty,” he said: “that the petition dates from Dauphiny.”
“Chou pour chou,” said the King. “Would it rob me the less, because it would also rob King Louis of his half of the perquisites? To concede it would be to concede the first principle of the octroi. The keystone is a small part of the arch; but remove it, and what then! Tell me that, M. Polisson.”
The secretary still ventured a deferential protest.
“Your Majesty’s duchy of Savoy is ultramontane. It is perhaps infected a little through its contiguity with revolutionary doctrines. Its predilections, as your Majesty knows, have always been for French arms, French arts, French sentiments. It may happen to have imbibed some of the worthless with the sound. A little concession to unrest would not make unrest more unrestful.”
The King took snuff from a jewelled box.
“That was a clumsy iteration, my charming Polisson,” said he. “But all concessions are an admission of weakness. If we slacken the curb, we shall presently be run away with. Be careful of that pouncet-box, or you will spill it on the carpet and make an unpleasant dust. Besides, it was given me by a very pretty child, and I love children.”
“But, sire—”
“Say no more, M. Polisson. Is the document prepared?”
All the while he was talking, the corner of his eye was given to Mr Trix. Now he turned a little, and said quite suddenly, “That is a very pretty idea of the earrings, Monsieur.”
So he would pass, butterfly-like on unsteady wings, from blossom to blossom of a flowery mind. There was some purpose, no doubt, ahead of his irrelative flittings, but it seemed for ever the prey to distractions by the way.
His allusion was to a certain novelty in dandyism, it appeared—to a couple of little diamonds which were let into the gold earrings worn by his visitor. For the rest, that visitor, it was obvious, attracted his most flattering regard. He observed, with admiration, his coat and breeches of fine buff cloth and fastidiously elegant cut; his tambour vest of white satin sprigged with silver, and his white silk stockings; his mushroom-coloured stock, and solitaire of broad black silk which was tied in a bow at the back of his natural black hair, and brought over his shoulders to hold a miniature framed in diamonds and turquoises; his silver-headed Malacca cane looped to the right wrist, and the tiny Nivernois hat held under his left arm; the slim steel-hilted sword at his hip (for continental “bloods” still held to a fashion which was grown out-of-date in England); his neat black pantoufles fastened with little gold-tagged laces—and only as to these last did his countenance express any doubt or qualification.
Still admiring, he arose from his chair. At the same moment M. Polisson skipped to his feet and fell over a stool. The King glanced at him vexedly.
“You are always the one, little Polisson,” he said, “to cough in the exquisite moment of the opera.”
Then he advanced to the visitor, very winningly.
“It is all a triumph of taste, Monsieur,” he said. “Accept the congratulations of a sympathetic spirit.”
Cartouche bowed profoundly.
“I have the good fortune of seeing M. Trix?” said the King; “the protégé of our late lamented Marquis? It is a pleasure of which I have often dreamed, and now realise to my instruction. You were very attached to your patron, Monsieur?”
“I returned his regard for me, Sire, with duty and affection.”
“He is a great loss to us. We had looked upon him as a bulwark against the licentious encroachments of the age. He would have found for your modern Rousseaus poor quarters at Chambéry—or at Le Prieuré, for that matter. No question of subversive petitions, had he remained alive. It was a pity he was so appallingly ugly. I am not sure about the laces, monsieur. They are a little democratic.”
“They have gold tags, Sire,” was all that Trix could find to answer.
“True,” said the King, “and that perhaps redeems them, like the jewel in the toad’s head. I understand, Monsieur, that the widow is as great a beauty as she is a fortune.”
Cartouche sniggered to himself, dogging these apparently inconsequent “doublings” of the royal mind.
“She is priceless in every way, Sire.”
The King looked at him rather keenly.
“It would want a courageous man,” he said, “to aspire to the priceless.”
Cartouche smiled, in a state of inner astonishment. To what end, of favour or correction, was all this irrelevance of the royal flibbertigibbet addressed? Knowing his own reputation in Turin, he could hardly flatter himself with a thought of promotion. And the next remark of the monarch only deepened his perplexity.
“Have you ever heard, Monsieur,” said Victor-Amadeus, “of a secret society calling itself the Illuminati?”
“Surely, Sire,” answered the visitor, profoundly bewildered. “It is, by general report, a fellowship of star-gazers, who, consulting the heavenly systems, flounder among the earthly.”
“Ay,” said the King: “and they meet at night, as astrologers should—here and there, on dark hill-sides, on remote roads, on lonely wastes. But doubtless you know that?”
“I know nothing whatever about their habits, Sire.”
“So?—I think, Monsieur, but I am not sure, that these ruffles might be doubled. Perhaps, however, it would vulgarise, in the tiniest degree, the exquisite simplicity of your conception. My faith! what Goths we have to educate, artists like you and me! Hopeless to expect their appreciation of these delicate nuances of taste and selection. The many-flounced flower is always foremost in their approval. Sometimes, in despair, I feel that I must yield the eternal conflict—go mad in pea-green stockings and a scarlet wig. But then I think how Nature, in her inaccessible eyries, continues to produce, without a didactic thought, her tastefullest forms; and I am comforted, because I recognise that the final appeal of elegance is to the gods. Has it ever occurred to you, Monsieur, that your patron was murdered by these Illuminati?”
The sudden swerve and swoop brought a gasp from Cartouche, verily as if his Majesty had whipped a hand from behind his back and struck him in the wind. He was, momentarily, quite staggered.
“No, never,” he could only ejaculate.
Victor-Amadeus conned him curiously.
“Admit, Monsieur, for the sake of argument, that it were so,” he said. “How, then, would you regard this Brotherhood?”
“Sire, as your Majesty regarded the Jesuits.”
“What! as a canker to be cut from us, lest it should come to corrupt the whole body of our estate?” The King scraped his chin thoughtfully. “I have heard said,” he murmured, “that of all compelling personalities, that of the fire-eater dilettante, the truculent wit, the gaillard with his tongue in his scabbard and venom at its point, is the most to be admired for its penetration, since it will pierce through both steel and brain. (I shall certainly adopt this inspiration of the earrings, Monsieur.) We are fortunate, at least, in recognising in M. Trix—with whose exploits in Turin report has made us familiar—the qualities of his reputation. Courageous, brilliant men, men of resource and daring, men even remorseless vengeurs at discretion, are not to be gathered like edelweiss at the expense of a little risk and trouble. And so La Prieuré has its Illuminati, Monsieur?”
“I learn it, for the first time, of your Majesty.”
“A convenient observatory, M. Trix, for the studying of systems—wild, remote, high-lifted—a place for storing thunderbolts, and launching them. It would need a man, to circumvent and storm it, almost as courageous as he who should aspire to the priceless. Well, di Rocco—though terribly ugly—was that man, on both counts, and he is dead. But Nemesis, if we are not mistaken, bore a child to him. Will you be our Prefect of Faissigny, M. Trix?”
“My God, Sire!”
The offer was so sudden, so unexpected, that he could utter no more on the instant. The King—a disciple, perhaps, of Walpole in the baser part of his policy—hastened to clinch an appointment he had set his heart on. Munificence happened to be the price he could bid for it, and without his being a penny the poorer thereby. He spoke on eagerly, eschewing hyperbole.
“We are not unacquainted, Monsieur, with the minutest circumstances of that tragedy, or of some local meetings of the Brotherhood which, in our opinion, were responsible for it. The Marquess was, of all men, calculated to be abhorrent to these would-be subverters of the constitution, whose aims are by no means so astral or so harmless as you would appear to believe. That they, and their pernicious doctrines, are not unrepresented in Faissigny I can well tell you. From the Col-de-Balme to Bonneville they have their secret rallying-points. The place is blotched with corruption. It needs a strong man, a man of local knowledge, whether inspired by vengeance, or by duty, or by both, to put his knife to those tainted parts. I had thought of M. de France in my difficulty. Bah! he is an old pompous vanity. I will quiet him with a little portfolio. In the meanwhile—”
“But, Sire!”
“In the meanwhile, I say, we can conceive of no better man than yourself to instruct vulgarity of the fallacy of ugliness. We do not expect M. Trix, the exquisite, the man of the sword, to condemn himself, unrewarded, to a virtual exile from life, as he regards it. We have had a little bird to whisper in our ears; and, as a consequence, we propose to endow our Prefect of Faissigny with a fine local estate, and a fine fortune, encumbered only with the condition of a wife. In short, Monsieur, we offer to bestow upon our faithful lieutenant the hand of the widowed lady di Rocco.”
Cartouche dropped his hat, picked it up, straightened himself, laughed a little laugh, and answered. His face was white and his lips were trembling.
“Pardon me, Sire; but that is impossible.”
Victor-Amadeus stared a little; then spoke drily.
“You may misconceive our prerogatives, Monsieur. Or, perhaps, you are married already?”
“No, Sire.”
“It is well, then. We have commanded the lady and her father to Court—a little prematurely, maybe; but, what would you!” (he shrugged his shoulders). “A loveless marriage makes a short mourning. In the meantime—”
“I will be your Prefect, Sire—if not for vengeance’ sake, for duty alone.”
“You do not believe he was murdered?”
“The suggestion shall at least stimulate me.”
“And nothing else? But we will see. A stake in that country would afford you a strong personal interest in its cleansing. We will see, we will see.” He turned to his secretary. “Make out M. Trix’s patent as Prefect of Faissigny, my dear Polisson,” he said; “and, for heaven’s sake, straighten your stock.”