Austria held the cards against the cardinal, and her
daughter-in-law assisted her in the game, when she was not
engaged in smiling at her husband. As for the cardinal, who
was lying on his bed with a weary and careworn face, his
cards were held by the Comtesse de Soissons, and he watched
them with an incessant look of interest and cupidity.
The cardinal’s face had been painted by Bernouin; but the
rouge, which glowed only on his cheeks, threw into stronger
contrast the sickly pallor of his countenance and the
shining yellow of his brow. His eyes alone acquired a more
brilliant luster from this auxiliary, and upon those sick
man’s eyes were, from time to time, turned the uneasy looks
of the king, the queen, and the courtiers. The fact is, that
the two eyes of the Signor Mazarin were the stars more or
less brilliant in which the France of the seventeenth
century read its destiny every evening and every morning.
Monseigneur neither won nor lost; he was, therefore neither
gay nor sad. It was a stagnation in which, full of pity for
him, Anne of Austria would not have willingly left him; but
in order to attract the attention of the sick man by some
brilliant stroke, she must have either won or lost. To win
would have been dangerous, because Mazarin would have
changed his indifference into an ugly grimace; to lose would
likewise have been dangerous, because she must have cheated,
and the infanta, who watched her game, would, doubtless,
have exclaimed against her partiality for Mazarin. Profiting
by this calm, the courtiers were chatting. When not in a bad
humor, M. de Mazarin was a very debonnaire prince, and he,
who prevented nobody from singing, provided they paid, was
not tyrant enough to prevent people from talking, provided
they made up their minds to lose.
They were therefore chatting. At the first table, the king’s
younger brother, Philip, Duc d’Anjou, was admiring his
handsome face in the glass of a box. His favorite, the
Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning over the back of the prince’s
chair, was listening, with secret envy, to the Comte de
Guiche, another of Philip’s favorites, who was relating in
choice terms the various vicissitudes of fortune of the
royal adventurer Charles II. He told, as so many fabulous
events, all the history of his perigrinations in Scotland,
and his terrors when the enemy’s party was so closely on his
track, of nights spent in trees, and days spent in hunger
and combats. By degrees, the fate of the unfortunate king
interested his auditors so greatly, that the play languished
even at the royal table, and the young king, with a pensive
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look and downcast eye, followed, without appearing to give
any attention to it, the smallest details of this Odyssey,
very picturesquely related by the Comte de Guiche.
The Comtesse de Soissons interrupted the narrator: “Confess,
count, you are inventing.”
“Madame, I am repeating like a parrot all the stories
related to me by different Englishmen. To my shame I am
compelled to say, I am as exact as a copy.”
“Charles II. would have died before he could have endured
all that.”
Louis XIV. raised his intelligent and proud head. “Madame,”
said he, in a grave tone, still partaking something of the
timid child, “monsieur le cardinal will tell you that during
my minority the affairs of France were in jeopardy, — and
that if I had been older, and obliged to take sword in hand,
it would sometimes have been for the evening meal.”
“Thanks to God,” said the cardinal, who spoke for the first
time, “your majesty exaggerates, and your supper has always
been ready with that of your servants.”
The king colored.
“Oh!” cried Philip, inconsiderately, from his place, and
without ceasing to admire himself, — “I recollect once, at
Melun, the supper was laid for nobody, and that the king ate
two-thirds of a slice of bread, and abandoned to me the
other third.”
The whole assembly, seeing Mazarin smile, began to laugh.
Courtiers flatter kings with the remembrance of past
distresses, as with the hopes of future good fortune.