That poor Scarron is getting sleep.”
A terrible event—that thrilled society, and indeed everyone, with horror—occurred in the South of France about this time. To the Court at Paris it struck especially home; inasmuch as the victim of the fiendish perpetrators of the crime was the Marquise de Castellana, at the time of her presentation at Versailles. She was then very young. She brought her husband, a grandson of the Duc de Villars, an immense fortune, and her beauty was so remarkable as to distinguish her amid the many beautiful women of the young kings Court. Louis, indeed, showed her marked attentions, and she was known as the beautiful Provençale. Very soon, however, the marquis, who was in the naval service, perished in a shipwreck; and a crowd of young and titled men flocked around the lovely young widow as suitors for her hand. Her choice fell on young Lanède, Marquis de Ganges, and for the first year or so of their married life they were very happy in their home at Avignon. Then slight disagreements arose between them. He began to yield to dissipation, while he accused her of coquetry. More than that he could not apparently bring against her. He had two brothers, the Abbé and the Chevalier de Ganges, and both these men fell deeply in love with their beautiful sister-in-law. In his capacity of a churchman, the young wife confided many of her thoughts and her affairs to the abbé. This he used as a tool to influence his brother, the marquis, as it better suited his own designs, either to ruffle his anger against her, or to smooth it. Then one day he pleaded his own passion to her. She repulsed him. The chevalier made a similar attempt, and was similarly rejected. Furious at this, they made common cause, and vowed to be revenged on her. First they attempted to poison her by putting some deadly stuff in her chocolate, but for some reason the attempt failed. It is thought that the deadly properties of the poison they used, were nullified by the milk, and she experienced no more than a passing uneasiness. Rumours of the attempt began, however, to circulate in Avignon and the neighbourhood; and the marquis proposed to his wife that they should go to his castle at Ganges to spend the autumn. She consented; though with some misgiving. The Castle of Ganges was a gloomy place surrounded on all sides by sombre avenues and densely-growing trees. After a short time spent with his wife at Ganges, the marquis returned to Avignon, leaving her in the care of his two brothers. A little while previously, a further large inheritance had fallen in to her, and she had begun to have such suspicions of the integrity of the family to which she had allied herself, that she made a will, confiding, in the event of her death, all her property to her mother, in trust, till her children, of which she had two or three, should be of age. The abbé and the chevalier, discovering what she had done, never ceased their endeavours to persuade her to revoke this will. What successful arguments they could have used to effect this, it is difficult to conceive—unless they employed threats—and these possibly they did use; since, after another abortive attempt to poison her, they one day entered her bedchamber, where she lay slightly indisposed with some passing ailment. The abbé approached her with a pistol in one hand and a cup of poison in the other, the chevalier following with a drawn sword in his hand. “You must die, madame,” said the abbé, pointing to the three fearful means for accomplishing the purpose. “The choice of the manner of it is to you.” The unfortunate woman sprang from her bed, and fell at the feet of the two men, asking what crime she had committed. “Choose!” was all the answer.
Resistance was hopeless, and the unhappy lady took the cup of poison and drank its contents, while the abbé held the pistol at her breast. Then the two assassins departed from the room, and locking her in, promised to send her the confessor she begged for.
Directly she was alone she tried to choke back the poison, by forcing a lock of her hair down her throat; then, clad only in her nightdress, she clambered to the window and let herself drop to the ground, lying nearly eight yards below. That the exits and doors were all watched she had little enough doubt; but by the aid of a servant, who let her out by a stable door, she gained the fields. The two men caught sight of her, and pursuing her to a farmhouse where she had sought refuge, they represented her as a mad-woman, and the chevalier hunted her from room to room of the house, till he trapped her in a remote chamber, where he stabbed her with his sword, dealing two thrusts in the breast, and five in the back, as she turned in the last endeavour to escape. Part of the sword-blade had remained in her shoulder, so violent was the blow. The piercing cries of the unhappy lady now brought a crowd of the people of the neighbourhood round the place; and among them the abbé, who had remained without to prevent any effort on her part to escape. Anxious to see whether she was dead, he presented his pistol at her, but it missed fire. This drew upon him the attention of the crowd, and they rushed to capture him; but with a desperate struggle he got away.
The marquise lived for nineteen days after this fearful scene; but all hope of life was gone. The corroding poison had done its fell work. Her husband was with her in her last moments, and she strove in her dying agonies to clear him of complicity in the foul murder; but the evidence against him was too strong, and the Parliament of Toulouse condemned him to confiscation of his property, degradation from his rank of nobility, and perpetual banishment. The chevalier escaped to Malta, where he soon after died, fighting against the Turks. The abbé fled to Holland, and assuming another name, his identity was lost. It is said that this horrible crime was but the prologue to many subsequent iniquitous adventures in which he was the prime mover. The sentence of being broken on the wheel which was passed on these two criminals, and was too good for them, they thus contrived to evade. Their execrable record lives among the long list of Causes Celébres of the time.[5]
CHAPTER XVI
A Lettre de Cachet—Mazarin’s dying Counsel—Madame Scarron continues to Receive—Fouquet’s intentions and what came of them—The Squirrel and the Snake—The Man in the Iron Mask—An Incommoding Admirer—“Calice cher, ou le parfum n’est plus”—The Roses’ Sepulchre.
It was in the very presence of the dead Scarron that Ninon was informed of the danger threatening St Evrémond. A lettre de cachet had been issued for conveying him to the Bastille, for the offence he had given in writing some satirical verses on the Peace of the Pyrenees. St Evrémond was very far from standing alone in his opinions on this treaty carried through by Mazarin; but he was unapproachable in the expression of them. Biting invective and caustic wit at the cardinal’s expense were graven in every line of his couplets, addressed to the Marquis de Créqui. Nor did the mockery cease at that point; it ridiculed the royal marriage itself, and the king was furious. This was the second time that St Evrémond had incurred the displeasure of Mazarin; on the first occasion, a reconciliation had been patched up, after a three months’ sojourn for St Evrémond in the Bastille, but this time he was past forgiveness—possibly, as it has been surmised, that in addition to the verses, he had given secret offence to the Court—and it was now but a matter of tracking St Evrémond to his hiding-place; for he had been warned of the letter of arrest for shutting him up in the Bastille, probably this time for the rest of his life. He had found refuge in the convent of the Capucins du Roule; but already his goods and money were confiscated, and it was Ninon who carried him, from her own resources, the necessary notes and gold for his getting away under cover of the night to Havre, where he arrived safely, and took ship for Dover, never to return to France.
The Majesty of Louis XIV. was as a thing divine; and the faintest shadow could not be permitted to cross the glory of that sun he chose for his double-mottoed device. Cardinal Mazarin, now at the point of death, renewed his counsel to the young king never to let will thwart his, but ever to bear the sceptre in his hand—in his own hand alone. So Mazarin, dealing his parting thrust of revenge on the queen-regent, died in the castle of Vincennes, unregretted by any, tolerated of later years, but despised by all. Someone made his epitaph, whose concluding lines were to the effect that having cheated and deceived through life, he ended with cheating the devil himself, since, when he came to fetch away his soul, he found he had not one.