“From Mademoiselle de Hauteford, probably,” replied the Page, thoughtfully. “I must give it to my master without delay, if he be strong enough to read it. We will talk more another day, good friend;”—and he left him.
“From Mademoiselle de Hauteford!” said the man. “Oh, ho!”—and he went home to tell all he knew to Louise, the soubrette.
CHAPTER VI.
The Marquis de Cinq Mars, the Count de Fontrailles, and King Louis the Thirteenth, all making fools of themselves in their own way.
THERE are some spots on the earth which seem marked out as the scene of extraordinary events, and which, without any peculiar beauty, or other intrinsic quality to recommend them, acquire a transcendent interest, as the theatre of great actions. Such is Chantilly, the history of whose walls might furnish many a lay to the poet, and many a moral to the sage; and even now, by its magnificence and its decay, it offers a new comment on the vanity of splendour, and proves, by the forgotten greatness of its lords, how the waves of time are the true waters of oblivion.
Be that as it may, Montmorency, Conde, are names so woven in the web of history, that nothing can tear them out, and these were the lords of Chantilly. But amongst all that its roof has sheltered, no one, perhaps, is more worthy of notice than Louis the Thirteenth: the son of Henry the Fourth and Mary de Medicis, born to an inheritance of high talents and high fortune, with the inspiring incitement of a father’s glory, and the powerful support of a people’s love.
It is sad that circumstance—that stumbling block of great minds—that confounder of deep-laid schemes—that little, mighty, unseen controller of all man’s actions, should find pleasure in bending to its will, that which Nature originally seemed to place above its sway. Endued with all the qualities a throne requires, brave, wise, clear-sighted, and generous; with his mother’s talents and his father’s courage, the events of his early life quelled every effort of Louis’s mind, and left him but the slave of an ambitious minister! a monarch but in name! the shadow of a King! How it was so, matters not to this history—it is recorded on a more eloquent page. But at the time of my tale, the brighter part of life had passed away from King Louis; and now that it had fallen into the sear, he seemed to have given it up as unworthy a farther effort. He struggled not even for that appearance of Royal state which his proud Minister was unwilling to allow him; and, retired at Chantilly, passed his time in a thousand weak amusements, which but served to hurry by the moments of a void and weary existence.
It was at this time, that the first news of the Cardinal de Richelieu’s illness began to be noised abroad. His health had long been declining; but so feared was that redoubtable Minister, that though many remarked the increased hollowness of his dark eye, and the deepening lines upon his pale cheek, no one dared to whisper what many hoped—that the tyrant of both King and people was falling under the sway of a still stronger hand.
The morning was yet in its prime. The grey mist had hardly rolled away from the old towers and battlements of the Chateau of Chantilly, which, unlike the elegant building afterwards erected on the same spot, offered then little but strong fortified walls and turrets.—The heavy night-dew lay still sparkling upon the long grass in the avenues of the Park, when two gentlemen were observed walking near the Palace, turning up and down the alley, then called the Avenue de Luzarches, with that kind of sauntering pace which indicated their conversation to be of no very interesting description.
Perhaps, in all that vast variety of shapes which Nature has bestowed upon mankind, and in all those innate differences by which she has distinguished man’s soul, no two figures or two minds could have been found more opposite than those of the two men thus keeping a willing companionship—the Count de Fontrailles, and the Marquis de Cinq Mars, Grand Ecuyer, or, as it may be best translated, Master of the Horse.