CHAPTER IX.

THE REVENGE OF SAINTE-CROIX--THE RENCONTRE IN THE BASTILLE

We left the Marchioness of Brinvilliers at the moment when her husband, in company with the Guet Royal, entered the court-yard, where she was lying in real or well-feigned insensibility, Sainte-Croix by her side, his drawn sword in his hand, and Camille Theria, a silent observer of the group, leaning with folded arms against one of the pillars of the doorway.

At the sudden exclamation of the Marquis, Sainte-Croix had started from his stooping position, and for a moment all was silence and expectation. Gaudin was a bold and ready-witted man; but the rage, jealousy, and hate that worked within him almost over-mastered even his well-practised invention. For an instant he thought of declaring his guilty passion for Marie, although at the risk of involving himself in her ruin; for he knew the hasty and vindictive temper of Brinvilliers. But this passed away, and with one great effort he turned calmly to Theria.

‘Now, sir,’ said he; ‘you will believe the assurance of this lady’s husband, that she is not what you took her for.’

The quick glance of intelligence that passed between them showed how well Theria understood the game Sainte-Croix was playing. Advancing to the Marquis, with a respectful bow, he tendered, in set phrase, his humble apology for having, in mistake, insulted ‘Madame la Marquise.’ He had an appointment on the spot, he declared; and the cloak which the Marchioness wore, together with the darkness of the night, had prevented his discovering that she was not the person he had expected, until her cries had brought in Sainte-Croix, who was passing, as he said himself, to his lodgings in the Rue des Bernardines, hard by the Place Maubert.

Whether fully satisfied with this explanation or not, the Marquis of Brinvilliers was too much a _coureur des rues_ himself to scan too closely the equivocal position in which he had found his wife. She accounted very naturally for her presence by her connection with Glazer, the apothecary, who furnished the medicines for her patients in the Hôtel Dieu. The guard retired on finding that no more disturbance was to be apprehended; and Panurge having summoned a _voiture de place_, Antoine took a friendly leave of Sainte-Croix, thanking him for his interposition, handed in the Marchioness, and they drove rapidly off in the direction of the Pont Notre Dame.

‘Adieu, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix, or _au revoir_, if you will,’ said Theria, when they were left once more alone together. ‘The poor Marquis wears his horns with a grace that belongs exclusively to the court of our Grand Monarque. It would be a pity to rob him of so becoming an ornament.’

Gaudin scarcely knew what answer to make. Nor indeed did Theria permit any, as he continued--

‘For myself I renounce all pretensions, and leave the field to you. The poor student is no rival for the gallant captain of the Regiment de Tracy.’

And with a smile that had in it more of mockery than mirth, he rapidly remounted the stairs, without waiting for a reply.

Sainte-Croix offered none. It was only by his clenched teeth and the quivering of his brow that his thoughts could have been read, as he strode with a hasty step along the Rue St. Victor to his own lodgings. His was one of those natures that take their tone from the accidental circumstances around them. He might have been a military hero, an enthusiastic priest, a successful politician. The illegitimacy of his birth, and the colour of the times, had made him an adventurer, a gambler, a criminal. His love for Marie de Brinvilliers had been passionate and intense; as it can be only in natures like his own. Now that its current had been forced back upon his heart, it seemed changed to a deep, deadly, withering hate.

‘I will be her bane--her curse!’ he exclaimed, as he paced up and down the apartment, after flinging his hat and cloak aside. ‘I will be her bad angel. She shall be mine--yes, body and soul--in life and after it! And I will triumph over that besotted fool, her husband. Come, my power--my talisman!’

With a short dry laugh, he stopped before a massive bureau which stood, surmounted by a narrow mirror, between the windows of the room; and taking up a small iron-clamped box, he opened it, and brought from it a small packet carefully sealed, and a phial of clear, colourless fluid.

‘Come,’ he continued, ‘the fools who envy me--the bastard-captain--my fortune, have said I had discovered the philosopher’s stone. I have it--it is here; the source, not of life, but death!’

He held the packet in his hand a moment; and then returning it to its place in the casket, resumed his hasty walk and broken exclamations of passion, strangely mixed with triumph.

An hour had passed away when La Prairie, one of his servants, entering the room, announced Françoise Rousset, _femme de chambre_ to the Marchioness of Brinvilliers. The girl entered with a look of terror that contrasted strangely with her lively and good-humoured face, and handing a note to Sainte-Croix with much the same air which a child would put on in presenting a cake to an elephant, timidly waited his answer.

‘Tell Madame la Marquise that I will attend to her,’ said Sainte-Croix, as he hastily ran over the contents of the note.

The girl curtsied, and left the room with more precipitation than grace. For Sainte-Croix was said to deal in strange and forbidden arts; and the same tastes which among the rich had won for him the reputation of a successful alchemist, had established for him also, amongst the vulgar, a character for intimacy with Satan and his imps, which his dark and lowering manner, at the moment Françoise entered, was well calculated to sustain.

‘So,’ he exclaimed, slowly rereading the letter, and dwelling on parts of it with a bitter emphasis, ‘you are determined not to outlive the night, and would have some of the subtle poison of which you have heard me speak. No, fair lady; we must not part so soon. Now begins _my_ triumph!’

And with these words he resumed his hat and mantle; and leaving orders that Lachaussée, should he return, was to await him in the house, he entered a fiacre, and drove to the Hôtel d’Aubray, the residence of the Marchioness, in the Rue Neuve St. Paul, not far from the Bastille.

His road lay across the Pont de la Tournelle, which connected the Ile St. Louis with the Quartier des Bernardins. The fiacre was lumbering along this route when Gaudin was startled from his moody reflections by its sudden stoppage. Looking out to ascertain its cause, he saw that they were in the Rue des Deux Ponts, and his horses entangled with those belonging to another carriage, escorted by two armed lackeys, whose altercation with the driver of the fiacre was not so loud but that, from the interior of the vehicle which they guarded, Sainte-Croix could hear a mingled sound of oaths, shrieks, and remonstrances, in a woman’s voice. Gaudin would have heeded this little, had it not been for the stoppage, which, excited as he was, chafed him beyond his usual coolness. Springing out of the fiacre, he found himself, almost before he knew it, crossing swords with the two lackeys, one of whom he slightly wounded; the other, hotly pressed, sheltered himself by running behind the carriage, calling loudly for help.

One of the carriage windows was now suddenly broken from within, and he could see that its occupants were struggling; the one for escape, the other to prevent it; whilst the shouts of _au secours!_ grew louder and louder. Sainte-Croix abandoned his pursuit of the servant, and was proceeding to open the door of the carriage, when it was suddenly forced from within, and a woman, young, beautiful, and richly dressed, half-fell, half-sprang into his arms.

‘Marotte Dupré!’

‘Gaudin de Sainte-Croix!’

The exclamations were uttered at the same instant.

‘Save me, as you are a gentleman!’ cried the girl; at the moment she was seized by a person masked, who leapt after her into the street.

‘_A moi!_ monsieur,’ cried Sainte-Croix, still holding the girl, and presenting his drawn sword to her companion.

The male occupant of the carriage burst into a loud laugh, and pulling off his mask, discovered the features of the Marquis of Brinvilliers!

‘_Ventre St. Bleu_, my friend! we are fated to odd rencontres,’ cried Brinvilliers. ‘You have begun the night by protecting my wife; you finish it by robbing me of a mistress.’

‘No, no!’ cried the girl, an actress at the theatre in the Rue du Temple. ‘I am no mistress of his: it is against my will that I am here: he carried me off from my mother’s. Save me, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix!’

‘Pardon, mademoiselle,’ returned Gaudin, sheathing his sword. ‘I cannot interfere in an affair of gallantry. _Au revoir_, Marquis, and success attend your wooing.’

So saying he resigned the poor girl, who continued to shriek and implore his aid in heart-rending entreaties, to the Marquis. Kissing his hand, he remounted the fiacre, which was by this time disengaged. And each proceeded on his way; the husband to his _amour_, the gallant to his wife!

The Hôtel d’Aubray, in which the Marchioness of Brinvilliers resided with her father, Monsieur Dreux d’Aubray, Lieutenant-civil of the city of Paris, was a massive building, as we have stated, in the Rue Neuve St. Paul, lately erected by Lemercier. The fiacre rolled under its arched gateway, encrusted with the cupids and wreaths which characterised the ornamental architecture of the period, and stopped in the court-yard. Except on the entresol, where a light shone from the window of the Marchioness’s boudoir, the heavy square was dark and silent. Françoise was on the watch, and admitting Sainte-Croix by an _escalier dérobé_ led him, with a light step, to a door concealed by tapestry, where, knocking with three low raps, she left him. The door opened, and Sainte-Croix, for the second time that night, stood face to face with the Marchioness of Brinvilliers.

It was a low but spacious room. Heavy curtains of rich, dark damask almost hid the two windows. The floor was covered with a soft Persian carpet--a luxury then unusual in Paris--and the air was heavy with the perfume that wreathed in thin, blue smoke from a silver _cassolette_ on the carved marble mantelshelf, over which hung a full-length portrait of the Marchioness, painted with all the elaborate finish of Mignard’s pencil, but scarcely so lovely as the original, on whom Sainte-Croix was gazing with a passion quite unaffected by the contempt he felt for her. On a table near the fire were piled rare fruits, and the reflection of the ruddy flame leapt and sparkled in the silver wine-flagons and tall-stemmed Venetian glasses.

On a settee beside the table sat Marie, in studied disarray. She might have been made up after one of Guido’s Magdalens, so beautiful were her rounded shoulders--so dishevelled her light hair--so little of real grief in her swimming eye, and so much of voluptuous abandonment in the attitude of resignation she wore when Sainte-Croix entered the room.

He comprehended all the artifice in a moment; but there are states of feeling in which trickery, so far from inspiring disgust, is most acceptable. All truth and sincerity was at an end between them; and the only tie that yet held them together--that of passion--has a craving for such dexterity as the Marchioness had exhibited in the _mise en scène_ of herself and her boudoir. Without an effort to resist its influence, and with a voluntary yielding up, for the moment, of his scorn and bitterness, Sainte-Croix passed on to the couch, and sinking at his mistress’s feet, felt her hands entwine his neck, and her long hair mingling with his own, as her rosy mouth, pressed to his forehead, half-sighed, half-whispered, ‘Forgive!’

Not a word was spoken. A more perfect adept in all the arts of gallantry than Sainte-Croix never encountered a more passionate and more calculating woman than Marie de Brinvilliers.

‘Gaudin!’ said the Marchioness, in a low, sweet voice, ‘you love me--still?’

‘Ever--ever!’ murmured Sainte-Croix. And so far as passion is love, he spoke truly at that moment.

‘I cannot live without thee, Gaudin,’ continued Marie. ‘Antoine knows of our love. I saw it in his face to-night as we returned from the Place Maubert. He will kill thee, Gaudin; and, my father--’ Marie shuddered with well-feigned terror.

‘Has your husband seen M. d’Aubray to-night?’ inquired Sainte-Croix.

‘They were closeted together after our return,’ replied the Marchioness.

Quick as thought Sainte-Croix raised his head to the face of the Marchioness, and, half-muttering to himself, said--

‘You have not played me false again?’ A shower of kisses was the only answer. Another pause ensued, broken by Sainte-Croix.

‘Marie!’ he said, ‘they must die, or our happiness is impossible.’

‘Who?’ asked the Marchioness eagerly.

‘Your husband and your father.’

With a hasty shriek Marie flung her lover from her, and retreated as far as the couch would allow her, repeating, as if in a dream, ‘Die! my husband and my father!’

‘Ay,’ said Gaudin, uttering each word slowly and calmly, as if he would have had it sink into the heart and memory of her he was addressing. ‘Ay--die! if we are to give the rein to our attachment. I cannot brook the slow and secret arts of an intrigue with thee, Marie; my love must have full scope and open daylight. I repeat, your husband and father must be removed. Do you understand me?’

The Marchioness returned no answer. Her hands were clasped over her eyes, and the hot tears trickled through her fingers, strained convulsively as if to shut out sight--sound--all sense whatever.

‘I have the means,’ continued Gaudin; ‘safe, secure means, that defy detection. You know the medicines that I have given you from time to time for your patients at the Hôtel Dieu. How did they work?’

‘Alas! alas!’ screamed the Marchioness, ‘I see it all; they were poisons! Oh, Gaudin!--lost--lost!’ And she buried her face in the cushions, writhing like a serpent.

Not an emotion was traceable in the face of Sainte-Croix, as, with a steady hand, he took a small packet from his cloak, and slowly breaking the seals, shook a portion of its contents into one of the glasses near him--a tall goblet with a piece of antique money blown in its hollow stem--which he filled with wine. He then raised the Marchioness from her crouching position, and, lifting the glass to his lips, said to her--

‘Marie; in your letter to me this night, you asked for means of death. You are not of that clay from which a self-murderess is made. Let our love end. I will set you an example.’

He made a motion as if to drink, but deliberately enough for the Marchioness to seize his hand and arrest the progress of the goblet to his mouth.

‘No! no!’ she ejaculated, ‘I will be your tool, your slave, even until death!’ Sainte-Croix placed the goblet on the table and clasped Marie in his arms, when suddenly a different door from that by which he had entered opened, and a tall, stately old man stood looking on the scene before him. Absorbed in each other they had not heard the door open, and it was not until his deep voice uttered the name of Marie that the Marchioness and Sainte-Croix perceived the intruder. It was Monsieur d’Aubray.

‘My father!’ shrieked the agonised woman, her eyes staring and her lips apart. Sainte-Croix spoke not a word, but rose and bowed.

The old man returned the salutation as ceremoniously as if the scene were passing at the king’s levée at Versailles.

‘To your chamber,’ he said at length, addressing himself to Marie. Then, turning to Gaudin, he continued, ‘Monsieur de Sainte-Croix, I will provide you with a lodging where you will run no risk of compromising the honour of a noble family.’

He drew from the pocket of his coat a folded paper. Sainte-Croix recognised the regal seal, and bowing, exclaimed--

‘A _lettre de cachet_, I presume. For Vincennes?’

‘Better, Monsieur le Capitaine,’ replied D’Aubray; ‘for the Bastille.’

‘I am too good a soldier to demur to any order of his Majesty, however disagreeable,’ said Sainte-Croix. ‘As for my appearance here, I will not attempt to justify it.’

‘_Palsambleu!_ you do well, sir,’ said the old man, his voice quivering with anger, ‘and I would recommend your example to Madame la Marquise, there, my daughter, and--your paramour.’

‘Monsieur, _de grace_!’ returned Gaudin deprecatingly. ‘Your son-in-law will find me ready on my return from confinement to make him every amende he can ask as a gentleman. But be not unkind to your daughter; it is I alone who am to blame in this matter.’

A grateful look from Marie rewarded Sainte-Croix for his apparent magnanimity, and even D’Aubray, much as he was moved, seemed struck with it; for, in a tone of less bitterness than before, he requested Sainte-Croix to attend him into the court-yard, where the archers were in waiting.

‘Willingly,’ answered Gaudin. ‘But, monsieur, before I go, let me exchange a pledge with you; do not refuse me this one favour:’ and filling another glass, he offered to D’Aubray the one he had before poured out.

‘To my speedy reformation,’ said he, as he raised his glass.

D’Aubray was on the point of drinking when, with a shriek, the Marchioness dashed the goblet from his hand, and it fell shivered on the floor.

‘What means this?’ said her father passionately. ‘Are you mad, madame?’

‘Nay,’ interrupted Sainte-Croix. ‘Apparently, Madame la Marquise has no desire to see me a better or a wiser man. Ah these women!’ he added, in a half-aside tone to D’Aubray, and shrugging his shoulders. ‘_Allons_, monsieur!’ then, as if suddenly recollecting something, he continued, ‘The staircase is guarded, I presume. You are too experienced a magistrate to neglect every precaution.’

Monsieur d’Aubray bowed.

‘Then, will you give me a moment alone with your daughter?’ asked Sainte-Croix. ‘On my honour, I will not abuse it.’

D’Aubray paused; but after a minute’s thought, replied--

‘You have behaved better than I expected, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix. I grant your request.’ And so saying he quitted the apartment.

As he left the boudoir the Marchioness gazed wildly and inquiringly at Gaudin, who, only whispering in her ear--‘Fool! you have thrown away a chance to-night that may never occur again’--threw open the window of the entresol, and, after a careful look, continued, in a low tone--‘As I expected, the court is empty.’

Then with a sign that checked the Marchioness, who was apparently on the point of flinging her arms about his neck, he quickly stepped from the window, and, aided by the trellis-work and ornaments of the intercolumnar architecture of the _hôtel_, descended easily and safely to the ground. A glance at the _porte-cochère_, which was open, showed him a fiacre in waiting, with two _exempts_, who guarded the porch with their halberts. Wrapping his cloak round his left arm, and drawing his sword, with a spring he was under the shade of the archway almost before the sentinel’s attention was awakened. Then, receiving on his cloaked arm the ill-directed blow of the one, he ran the other through the body, and springing over him was in the street before the alarm was given.

He sped along, and was turning the corner of the Rue Neuve St. Paul, when someone suddenly sprang from a doorway upon him, and then, being borne down by his impetuous rush, still clung round his body and effectually hampered his progress. With curses he strove to free his sword-arm, and would soon have rid himself of his assailant had not the archers, who were in chase, at that moment arrived to take their prisoner from the clutches of his captor, who was neither more nor less than Benoit, our friend the mountebank of the Carrefour du Châtelet, who, at the termination of an adventure to be hereafter explained, had tracked Sainte-Croix to the Hôtel d’Aubray, and remained crouched in a doorway of the Rue St. Paul until the arrival of the archers.

Sullenly Sainte-Croix resigned his sword to the officer in command, who attended him to the fiacre; and then, mounting beside him, they set off at a foot pace to the Bastille. During the short journey Sainte-Croix was silent; and as the fiacre rolled over the drawbridge of the frowning fortress, which he had traversed under such different circumstances but the evening before, and along its barbican lined with low cabarets, wherein soldiers were gaming and drinking, to the inner gate, it would have been difficult to say which was the official and which the prisoner. On their arrival at the lodge of the Under-Governor a parley was held, which ended in that functionary expressing his regret to Monsieur de Sainte-Croix that he could not accommodate him with a separate apartment.

‘Do not trouble yourself, monsieur,’ replied Sainte-Croix, with a forced laugh. ‘Provided my fellow-lodger is silent and cleanly, I had rather have his company than that of my own thoughts. I have no doubt we shall be long enough together to become excellent friends.’

‘If you do not object, then,’ answered the courtly deputy, ‘to another inmate, I have a chamber that will suit you exactly. Galouchet, conduct Monsieur de Sainte-Croix to Number Eleven in the Tour du Nord. I wish you a good night, sir.’

With mutual inclinations they separated, and Sainte-Croix followed the gaoler along the gloomy passages. His guide at length paused at a door numbered eleven, and, unlocking it, threw it open with a polite ‘_Par ici_, monsieur.’

Gaudin entered. The room was not a _cachot_. It had a boarded floor and a tolerably large window, though heavily barred. There was nothing in its appearance of those terrible underground dungeons, which, in the notions of the vulgar, formed the only places of confinement in the Bastille. It contained some rude furniture and two truckle beds, one of which was occupied.

The gaoler set the light on the table, and, as he turned to depart, the unwonted glare roused the original tenant of the room. Starting up on his pallet he disclosed to Sainte-Croix the livid face of the prisoner of the preceding evening--the physician of the Carrefour du Châtelet.

It was Exili!