The king stopped at these words from a habit of cruelty; then he added:—
“You will leave to-night to attend to my affairs with the government of Venice. You need be under no anxiety about your wife; I shall take charge of her at Plessis; she will certainly be safe here. Henceforth I shall watch over her with greater care than I have done since I married her to you.”
Hearing these words, Marie silently pressed her father’s arm as if to thank him for his mercy and goodness. As for Louis XI., he was laughing to himself in his sleeve.
CHAPTER IV. THE HIDDEN TREASURE
Louis XI. was fond of intervening in the affairs of his subjects, and he was always ready to mingle his royal majesty with the burgher life. This taste, severely blamed by some historians, was really only a passion for the “incognito,” one of the greatest pleasures of princes,—a sort of momentary abdication, which enables them to put a little real life into their existence, made insipid by the lack of opposition. Louis XI., however, played the incognito openly. On these occasions he was always the good fellow, endeavoring to please the people of the middle classes, whom he made his allies against feudality. For some time past he had found no opportunity to “make himself populace” and espouse the domestic interests of some man “engarrie” (an old word still used in Tours, meaning engaged) in litigious affairs, so that he shouldered the anxieties of Maitre Cornelius eagerly, and also the secret sorrows of the Comtesse de Saint-Vallier. Several times during dinner he said to his daughter:—
“Who, think you, could have robbed my silversmith? The robberies now amount to over twelve hundred thousand crowns in eight years. Twelve hundred thousand crowns, messieurs!” he continued, looking at the seigneurs who were serving him. “Notre Dame! with a sum like that what absolutions could be bought in Rome! And I might, Pasques-Dieu! bank the Loire, or, better still, conquer Piedmont, a fine fortification ready-made for this kingdom.”
When dinner was over, Louis XI. took his daughter, his doctor, and the grand provost, with an escort of soldiers, and rode to the hotel de Poitiers in Tours, where he found, as he expected, the Comte de Saint-Vallier awaiting his wife, perhaps to make away with her life.
“Monsieur,” said the king, “I told you to start at once. Say farewell to your wife now, and go to the frontier; you will be accompanied by an escort of honor. As for your instructions and credentials, they will be in Venice before you get there.”
Louis then gave the order—not without adding certain secret instructions—to a lieutenant of the Scottish guard to take a squad of men and accompany the ambassador to Venice. Saint-Vallier departed in haste, after giving his wife a cold kiss which he would fain have made deadly. Louis XI. then crossed over to the Malemaison, eager to begin the unravelling of the melancholy comedy, lasting now for eight years, in the house of his silversmith; flattering himself that, in his quality of king, he had enough penetration to discover the secret of the robberies. Cornelius did not see the arrival of the escort of his royal master without uneasiness.