This time a cloak and a low-pulled hat masked the features, but Luc was sure of the remarkably fine and well-set figure; the stranger was, too, just sufficiently above the ordinary stature to be conspicuous anywhere, in any dress.
The man who waited on the chambers happened to be in the room, and Luc remarked to him on the mysterious character of the house opposite.
He was answered that the place was commonly believed to be the residence of one of the fortune-tellers with which Paris swarmed; one of the houses where attempts were made to raise the Devil, to pry into the future; where potions, charms, and maybe poisons were sold; a place of rendezvous also for intrigues that had some reason for concealment, or, in themselves, lacked the element of that mystery that alone made them alluring.
Many great people, even the greatest, the man averred, would go to these places, and take the utmost pains with their disguises—which, however, very seldom deceived anyone, as all the world knew that all the world went. But the mystery was the great charm, and many adventures appeared palatable when undertaken in a cloak and mask that would have seemed stale enough enacted in broad daylight.
“Of course,” finished the fellow, “since La Voisine was burnt in the Place de la Grêve, they have been more careful, these people; but nevertheless, Monseigneur, they become very bold, for they say the King himself visits them often enough, and that everybody knows it; and His Highness the Regent encouraged them to a great extent, though they say he never raised the Devil.”
Luc smiled; he thought of M. de Richelieu. He wondered if such men had not raised the Devil, in very tangible form indeed, and set him up as master over France.
So it was said that the King spent his leisure with these tawdry prophetesses and cheap tricksters! Since he came to Paris Luc had heard several ends of gossip about the King that, true or not, served to a little blur his vivid picture of the young Louis he was so ardent to serve, whom he had served for ten strenuous years without recognition or reward.
It was a frivolous age, a restless age, an age of change, of great possibilities. France was brilliant yet corrupt, energetic yet slothful. Paris did not dazzle so much to Luc’s near sight as it had done to his distant gaze. Carola Koklinska became to him as a symbol of the city—so calm, lofty, high, and bright from a distance, so mean, dishonoured, falsely glittering near, yet with an immortal heart concealed somewhere behind the gaudy shams.
Paris was great, was eternal, held the seed of all future thought, was the theatre of all present action; yet her streets were thronged by the foppish, the foolish, the ignorant, and the starving. Her government was in the hands of men like M. de Richelieu, who in their turn were influenced by women like Carola—greedy soldiers of fortune who kept the point of view of the gutter from whence they came.
Luc’s heart swelled to a sense of agony—the agony of powerlessness. All the pageant that passed by him he knew only by glimpses; he was outside, he could do nothing—nay, worse than that, he was even being swept along with the others, no better than they, a mere inarticulate creature played upon by the devices of those he met. Even M. de Richelieu, in his opulent consciencelessness, was expressing, fulfilling himself, turning circumstances into what he wished them to be, making his life what he wanted it; even Carola had forced the hand of Fate to satisfy her sordid ambition; while he was baffled, thwarted, like a thing chained.