The War of Women. Volume 1

"You are Monsieur le Baron de Canolles, are you not?"

"I am."

"Captain in the Navailles regiment?"

"Yes."

"Sent upon a confidential mission by the Duc d'Épernon?"

Canolles nodded his head.

"In that case, in the names of the king, and her Majesty the Queen Regent, I arrest you."

"Your warrant?"

"Here it is."

"But, monsieur," said Canolles, handing back the paper after he had glanced over it rapidly, "it seems to me that I know you."

"Know me! Parbleu! Wasn't it in the same village where I arrest you to-day, that I brought you an order from Monsieur le Duc d'Épernon to betake yourself to the court? Your fortune was in that commission, my young gentleman. You have missed it; so much the worse for you!"

Claire turned pale, and fell weeping upon a chair; she had recognized the impertinent questioner.

"Monsieur de Mazarin is taking his revenge," muttered Canolles.

"Come, monsieur, we must be off," said Cauvignac.

Claire did not stir. Canolles, undecided as to the course he should pursue, seemed near going mad. The catastrophe was so overpowering and unexpected that he bent beneath its weight; he bowed his head and resigned himself.

Moreover, at that period the words "In the king's name!" had not lost their magic effect, and no one dared resist them.

"Where are you taking me, monsieur?" he said.

"Are you forbidden to afford me the poor consolation of knowing where I am going?"

"No, monsieur, I will tell you. We are to escort you to Île-Saint Georges."

"Adieu, madame," said Canolles, bowing respectfully to Madame de Cambes; "adieu!"

"Well, well," said Cauvignac to himself, "things aren't so far advanced as I thought. I will tell Nanon; it will please her immensely."

"Four men to escort the captain!" he cried, stepping to the door. "Forward, four men!"

"And where am I to be taken?" cried Madame de Cambes, holding out her arms toward the prisoner. "If the baron is guilty, I am still more guilty than he."

"You, madame," replied Cauvignac, "are free, and may go where you choose." And he left the room with the baron.

Madame de Cambes rose, with a gleam of hope, and prepared to leave the inn at once, before contrary orders should be issued.

"Free!" said she. "In that case I can watch over him; I will go at once."

Darting to the window, she was in time to see Canolles in the midst of his escort, and to exchange a farewell wave of the hand with him. Then she called Pompée, who, hoping for a halt of two or three days, had established himself in the best room he could find, and bade him make ready for immediate departure.

VIII

It was an even more melancholy journey for Canolles than he had anticipated. The most carefully guarded prisoner has a false feeling of freedom in the saddle, but the saddle was soon succeeded by a carriage, a leathern affair, the shape of which and its capacity for jolting are still retained in Touraine. Furthermore, Canolles' knees were interlocked with those of a man with the beak of an eagle, whose hand rested lovingly on the butt of a pistol. Sometimes, at night, for he slept during the day, he hoped to be able to elude the vigilance of this new Argus; but beside the eagle's beak were two great owl's-eyes, round, flaming, and most excellently adapted for nocturnal observations, so that, turn which way he would, Canolles would always see those two round eyes gleaming in that direction.

While he slept, one of the two eyes also slept, but only one. Nature had endowed this man with the faculty of sleeping with one eye open.

Two days and two nights Canolles passed in gloomy reflections; for the fortress of Île Saint-Georges – an inoffensive fortress enough, by the way – assumed terrifying proportions in the prisoner's eyes, as fear and remorse sank more deeply into his heart.

Remorse, because he realized that his mission to Madame la Princesse was a confidential mission, which he had made the most of to further his own interests, and that he had committed a terrible indiscretion on that occasion. At Chantilly, Madame de Condé was simply a fugitive. At Bordeaux, Madame de Condé was a rebel princess. Fear, because he knew by tradition the appalling vengeance of which Anne of Austria, in her wrath, was capable.

There was another source of perhaps even keener remorse than that we have mentioned. There was, somewhere in the world, a young woman, a beautiful, clever young woman, who had used her great influence solely to put him forward; a woman who, through her love for him, had again and again imperilled her position, her future, her fortune; and that woman, not only the most charming of mistresses, but the most devoted of friends, he had brutally abandoned, without excuse, at a time when her thoughts were busy with him, and instead of revenging herself upon him she had persistently bestowed additional tokens of her favor upon him; and her voice, instead of sounding reproachfully in his ears, had never lost the caressing sweetness of an almost regal favor. It is true that that favor had come to him at an inauspicious moment, at a moment when Canolles would certainly have preferred disgrace; but was that Nanon's fault? Nanon had looked upon that mission to his Majesty as a method of augmenting the fortune and worldly position of the man with whom her mind was constantly filled.

All those who have loved two women at once, – and I ask pardon of my lady-readers, but this phenomenon, which they find it so hard to understand, because they never have but one love, is very common among us men, – all those who have loved two women at once, I say, will understand that as Canolles reflected more and more deeply, Nanon recovered more and more of the influence over his mind which he thought she had lost forever. The harsh asperities of character which wound one in the constant contact of daily intercourse, and cause momentary irritation, are forgotten in absence; while, on the other hand, certain sweeter memories resume their former intensity with solitude. Fair and lost to him, kind and ill-treated, – in such guise did Nanon now appear to Canolles.

The fact was that Canolles searched his own heart ingenuously, and not with the bad grace of those accused persons who are forced to a general confession. What had Nanon done to him that he should abandon her? What had Madame de Cambes done that he should follow her? What was there so fascinating and lovable in the little cavalier of the Golden Calf? Was Madame de Cambes so vastly superior to Nanon? Are golden locks so much to be preferred to black that one should be a perjured ingrate to his mistress, and a traitor to his king, all for the sake of exchanging black locks for golden? And yet, oh, pitiable human nature! Canolles brought all these eminently sensible arguments to bear upon himself, but Canolles was not convinced. The heart is full of such mysteries, which bring happiness to lovers and despair to philosophers. All this did not prevent Canolles from hating himself, and berating his own folly soundly.

"I am going to be punished," he said, thinking that the punishment effaces the crime; "I am going to be punished, and so much the better. I suppose I shall have to do with some very rough-spoken, very insolent, very brutal captain, who will read to me, from the supreme height of his dignity as jailer-in-chief, an order from Monsieur de Mazarin, who will point out a dungeon for me, and will send me to forgather with the rats and toads fifteen feet underground, while I might have lived in the light, and flourished in the sun's rays, in the arms of a woman who loved me, whom I loved, and whom it may be that I still love. Cursed little viscount! why need you have served as envelope to such a fascinating viscountess? But is there anywhere in all the world a viscountess who is worth what this particular one is likely to cost me? For it's not simply the governor, and the dungeon fifteen feet under ground; if they think me a traitor, they won't leave matters half-investigated; they will pick a quarrel with me about that Chantilly affair, which I could not pay too heavy a penalty for, if it had been more fruitful of results for me; but it has brought me in just three kisses upon her hand. Triple idiot, when I had the power, not to use it! Poor fool! as Monsieur de Mazarin says, – to be a traitor, and not collect the pay for his treason! Who will pay me now?"

Canolles shrugged his shoulders contemptuously in reply to this mental question.

The man with the round eyes, clear-sighted as he was, could not understand this pantomime, and gazed at him in amazement.

"If they question me," Canolles continued, "I'll not answer; for what answer can I make? That I was not fond of Monsieur de Mazarin? In that case I was under no obligation to enter his service. That I did love Madame de Cambes? A fine reason that to give a queen and a first minister! So I won't reply at all. But these judges are very sensitive fellows; when they ask questions they like to be answered. There are brutal wedges in these provincial jails; they'll shatter my slender knees, of which I was so proud, and send me back to my rats and my toads a perfect wreck. I shall be bandy-legged all my life, like Monsieur le Prince de Conti, and that would make me extremely ugly, even supposing that his Majesty would cover me with his wing, which he will take good care not to do."

Besides the governor and the rats and toads and wedges, there were certain scaffolds whereon rebels were beheaded, certain gallows whereon traitors were hanged, and certain drill grounds where deserters were shot. But all this was of small consequence to a well-favored youth like Canolles, in comparison with bandy legs.

He resolved, therefore, to keep his mind clear and to question his companion upon the subject.

The round eyes, the eagle's beak, and the frowning expression of that personage gave him but slight encouragement to accost him. However, no matter how stolid a man's face may be, it must soften a little at times, and Canolles took advantage of an instant when a grimace resembling a smile passed across the features of the subaltern who watched him so sharply.

"Monsieur!" said he.

"Monsieur?" was the reply.

"Excuse me if I take you away from your reflections."

"Make no excuses, monsieur, for I never reflect."

"The devil! you are surely endowed with a fortunate mental organization, monsieur."

"And therefore I never complain."

"Ah, well, you're not like me in that; for I am very much inclined to complain."

"Of what, monsieur?"