This fellow, partly charlatan, yet genuinely gifted, and not without a wild flash of genius at times, and real moments of spiritual insight and exaltation, had contrived, by the fascination of the supernatural arts he professed and by his wit and readiness in following the politics and scandals, the rumours and whispers of the hour, to attach to himself a considerable following, both in the Prince's household and among those who came and went in the palace, and whose visits to the alchemist (as he chose to call himself, though he had little real pretension to any of the honours of hermetic philosophy) were not noticed amid the manifold distractions of the huge establishment.
The Princess of Orange continued Duprès' most ardent patroness and most credulous dupe; she spent hours in his laboratory watching him tell her fortune by means of melted lead, by the markings in the blade bone of a freshly killed sheep, by the arrangement of strange Eastern playing-cards, or in observing the fusing and transformation of various chemicals into powder and essences which Duprès declared were the first steps to the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone.
Anne was hot on this pursuit; the events that shook the Netherlands, the threatened upheaval which might overshadow her husband, the daily torture and death of heretics, the cries arising from the tortured prisoners, the Regent's anxiety and confusion, the enigmatic attitude of the awful Philip—none of these things interested the Lutheran Princess whose father had been so splendid a champion of the Reformed Faith; but to stand over glass retorts and glowing furnaces, to listen to the Frenchman's tedious and learned explanations of matter she could not even begin to understand, to meddle with signs and wonders, to attempt to raise spirits, to experiment with perfumes, dyes, and cosmetics—all this had a deep and irresistible fascination for Anne of Orange.
And Duprès made his full profit thereby, for he obtained from her considerable sums of money, and when she had not these to give, jewels, ornaments, and even costly articles from her chambers. Rénèe le Meung had known Duprès at Dresden and then believed him to be a worthless, though cunning creature, and she found it hard to stand by and see him fool the Princess and mock the Prince; but William and all the members of the Nassau family who came and went in Brussels treated Anne and her doings with magnificent indifference, Duprès was beneath their notice, and it was not in Rénèe to play the tale-bearer and carry complaints of her mistress to her master, so she, too, had to spend the dreariest of hours listening to Duprès' jargon and watching his futile experiments, while the sickly smell of perfumes and the acrid odour of chemicals made her head heavy and feverish.
But when the Princess began visiting the laboratory alone, and the whispers and laughter grew among her women, Rénèe went through an agony of hot shame and bitter indignation compared to which the dullness of her former life was peace.
Anne was making a jest of herself, and Rénèe winced as if she had herself been humiliated, not because of Anne, but because of the name she carried.
Towards this momentous winter, when Brussels was brilliant with the pompous marriage of Alexander of Parma, Anne's women began to openly laugh at their hated mistress.
They had ceased to believe that she went to Duprès' studios solely to study magic and alchemy.
"It is to meet that young lawyer, Jan Rubens," they said, and made a mock of her behind her back.
Rénèe, sick of living, sick of loving, weak and pale with watching the ruin of her people and her faith, roused at this.