The Arm and the Darkness Page 16

  His one unsleeping horror was that he might one day lose this will to live. Out of this frenzy came his devastating ambition for France, his dedication to the dream of bringing about her internal unity, his determination to confer power and splendor upon her, of vitalizing her and rendering her immune to disintegration and decay and ruin. She-became, for him, a symbol of himself, of his own will to live, of his own indomitability. His soul believed that in the existence and strength and triumph of France was his own continued existence and strength and triumph. France must live, lest he die.

  Death lived in his soul. This gave a kind of unearthly phosphorescence to his flesh, as if he were already dead. His mind operated through and over his dying and tortured body, with a grim and desperate defiance, shining incandescently through his large unfathomable eyes, which, at rare moments, were heavy and dim with melancholy. There was a fixity about them, like a cat’s unwinking gaze, and their glance had a slowness of movement which intimidated, set as they were under commanding and extraordinary brows. They dominated his countenance, threw into insignificance his delicate slight face and extreme ascetic pallor, his arched, finely cut nose, the tight fragile lips between the soldierly mustaches and the pointed small beard. About that mouth were the graven lines of suffering and self-discipline, and between the eyes were the taut furrows which resulted from intense thought and frightful headaches. There was about him an inhuman assurance and steadfast quietness which gave him the air of a man who suffered in silence. But this was not so. From himself came the stories of his headaches, and his complaints of them. In spite of his adult and lofty irony, his secret ridicule of superstition, his slightly smiling disgust of the simple folk who employed incantations and magic, he so descended, in the extremity of his pain, as to offer a Novena of Masses if public prayers would be instrumental in relieving his agony. He even devoted himself to Our Lady of Ardilles in those blind moments of fervor employed by the wisest and most disillusioned men when confronted by inexorable nature and calamity. Like the aristocratic Petronius, who believed nothing and sacrificed to the gods on the premise that it did no harm and might mystically do some good, he frequently implored the people to pray for him. Later, he had moments of amused and embarrassed shame, but these he did not betray even to his familiars.

  He was a natural actor. His own artistry and love for drama made him sedulously study those aspects and attitudes needed to impress his people, those lovers of air and grace and rich color. He cultivated a presence, which his inherent dignity enhanced, though he was slender rather than tall. He radiated dominion, partly assumed, partly natural. He walked slowly and majestically, his thin dark hair clinging to the shape of his delicate skull, his red robes falling heavily about him in exquisite folds, as though he employed a toga-folder in the manner of the ancient Roman patricians. He had a secret admiration for the fineness and whiteness of his narrow hands, and even in the moments of deepest thought, and in audiences, had a mannerism of stroking them and holding them high to drain the discoloring blood from them and give them delicacy. Nothing in his slow and languid movements, his meditative manner, his quiet but resonant voice, gave a hint of the febrile vigor and passion of his mind. He was, even to himself, a character in a stately opera, neutral and silent and reserved, yet in these very things the more frightful and impelling, like an unbroken and violent storm approaching across serene heavens, always threatening to break into devastation and death while still silent and pent. This aspect of potential violence and disaster unnerved both friend and foe alike, and was partly the secret of his power.

  Like all those great and terrible men who subdue and rule other men, he had a quality of mountebankery. But unlike his peers, he was not self-convinced by his own mountebankery, nor was he hypnotized by it into the belief that it was natural to him and not mountebankery at all. Never, save in rare instances, did he deceive himself. Strangely, this made him only the more powerful, and gave him flexibility, for he knew that mountebankery was a prime necessity of those who wish to impress and rule the masses, and even the intelligent. But he was never indelicate, never gross. This came partly from his real fastidiousness, and partly from his knowledge that the best of mountebanks cultivate elegance. So he cultivated this elegance, which was native to him, for he loathed the people and was nauseated by their sweat and their smells. He served two purposes, thus: he retained his own fastidiousness, and impressed the people.

  Even his enemies admitted that Richelieu seemed inspired by but one ardor, one passion: the unity of France. Even his most hating foes acknowledged that he loved his country, that his most violent and ruthless machinations stemmed from his resolve to bring glory and strength upon her.

  But Richelieu knew secretly that nationalism is the pretense of a man who finds some men who are not hateful—his own. Nationalism invariably springs from a hatred of all people; but egotism demands that one’s own be at least thought tolerable. Richelieu, still not deceiving himself, knew that nationalism is the necessary illusion of the soldier, but a philosopher who espouses it has lost his logic, a statesman, his perspective, an artist, his creative sympathy, a wise man, his humor, a priest, his God. In serving France, Richelieu at least suspended his logic, his perspective, his sympathy, his humor, and, inevitably, his God. A man who did not suspend these was afflicted by hesitation and doubt, and so was lost.

  When he was alone, as he was this beautiful morning in early summer, he was assaulted, beset and besieged, by himself, by his terror of death, by his illness, despair and melancholy. Believing that a man must first fight himself, he often forced himself to be alone, where he wrestled with that dual spirit of his as Jacob wrestled with the angel. But he himself was a dark angel, and not an angel of light. In these self-flagellations was the instinct of a masochist who despised himself.

  Rigorously, in the morning, he officiated at Mass, or attended it. But afterwards, he retired to his chamber, to sink into bed in a veritable swoon of exhaustion. It was always well past noon before he rose again. About an hour before noon, he would arouse himself, and lie in his bed, feeling that he had just emerged from the tomb. He would lie supine, motionless, staring before him, his eyes idly following a ray of sunshine, a dust mote, a shadow. But behind that immobile countenance, his army of besieging thoughts would march and countermarch, however he might try to restrain and discipline them. Now he was vulnerable; now he had no defense. Nor, secretly, did he desire it.

  His chamber was great and lofty, and very silent, though beyond the massive doors those called for the day’s interviews waited in impatient masses. The white plaster ceiling, at which he frequently stared blindly, was carved chastely. The panelled walls glowed richly in the sun which poured through the tall windows, the polished glass of which was set in tiny leaded panes. His scarlet curtained bed, whose crimson velvet canopy, golden-fringed, extended almost to the ceiling, faced the window, and was covered by red silken coverlets embroidered with the arms of his family, and with an immense golden cross. To his right was the great carved fireplace, in which, even in the summer, burned a dull crimson fire, for Richelieu was eternally shaken by strong or feebler chills. The wall above the fireplace was carved intricately, and at the right was a tall gilt chair, covered by crimson velvet, in which he often sat during his midnight meditations. On the other side of the fireplace, near the wall in which the windows were set, was a carved chest of black wood, on which stood three golden bowls. A long black wooden table stood before the window, covered with some rare objets d’art, which he loved, collected and cherished. From his bed he could pick out the touches of red, blue, yellow and green which flecked them.

  As he lay shivering in his bed, his slight body hardly lifting the silken crimson coverlets, he could hear, subdued, the murmuring and footsteps of passing throngs below. But these sounds only enhanced the breathless quiet of his room. He stared before him, and saw nothing but his life, and all he had done, and the things he must do. He could not decide which wearied him more: the past, or the f
uture. His weariness was like a heavy stone on his body, crushing it.

  The sockets of his extraordinary eyes burned dryly, aching with sleeplessness. He closed his lids; the light that poured through the windows lay on those lids and created dim red shadows before his shuttered vision. Though he did not drowse, dim tortured fragments floated before his eyes, like those which one perceives when falling asleep—a hand, an eye, a pale shadow of an unknown face, bloodless lips open upon a silent cry.

  Suddenly, without any warning, without any premonition, the face of Anne of Austria, the Queen of France, rose up before his clouded vision, not faintly, not bloodless, but in its full young beauty and bewitching loveliness. A flood of intolerable heat pervaded his body, and he twitched violently, as a man afflicted with epilepsy twitches. “The vile Spaniard!” he murmured, involuntarily. But the heat of his body increased to a devastating fever. He saw those green large eyes under golden brows and lashes, the rose and pearl of those soft young cheeks, the arch of soft chestnut hair rising over the snowy forehead, the living moistness of that parted full red mouth with its Habsburg under-lip, pouting and protruding. He saw the slope of those famous white shoulders, and the curve of those beautiful arms, like marble come to life.

  He writhed on his bed, overcome by agony. In his middle was a pit of aching emptiness and wild yearning. All the women he had known became only anonymous shadows, their wine emptied, the vessels of their bodies broken and forgotten. But this woman whom he had never known, whom his hand had never caressed, was like a disease in his flesh. Those emerald eyes had looked upon him only with fear, hatred and loathing. Even when his fingers had touched her own, he had felt their shrinking, and he had seen the averting of her gaze as if she had glanced at corruption. At the exact moment when his lips might touch her hand, she had withdrawn it with an almost imperceptible shudder. She had concealed her hatred under a calm and indifferent manner, but it had blazed in her eyes, trembled like the light of a sword on her parted lips. Though she was young, she had the imperious hauteur of the Habsburgs, the remote pride. But she had not been able to conceal her emotions at the sight of the Cardinal.

  “I might be your friend,” he had whispered once to her. But she had regarded him then with impassive coldness and immobile hatred. He had not added: “Or, I might be your most deadly enemy.”

  He had become her deadly enemy. There was nothing too mean, too base, for him to do to bring wretchedness and misery to this Habsburg princess. In tormenting her, there was surcease for his own pain. He had besmirched her in the eyes of her husband, that cold and capricious and violent man. He had poisoned the mind of her mother-in-law against her, that dull and repulsive woman, Marie de Medici. He had intrigued against her, in great things and in petty. He brought hell and purgatory to her life, sad enough as it was in that city of strangers and enemies. When he found nothing, he invented. It was a mystery, even to his familiars, how such a man, such a statesman and soldier, such a politician and prince of the Church, could gather all the forces of his nature, his genius, his intelligence and his subtlety, to annoy, frustrate, embitter and torture one defenseless young woman, hardly more than a girl. It was as if Lucifer himself might stoop to torment a poor frail little butterfly, or withdraw himself from the seduction of a world, from a frightful assault on heaven, to pluck apart a rose.

  He set his spies about her, to report her slightest word to him, to watch her every movement. He had set a whisper about Paris about her debaucheries, which existed only in his imagination. She, in turn, quivering, fragile and helpless, watched him spin his black web about her. She struggled; had, in her own pay, spies of her own, but they were poor creatures compared with the diabolical cleverness of his. She felt the meshes of his lies about her, and could do nothing. She had no friends. She had learned the bitterest lesson of the defenseless: that every man’s hand is against the helpless, every man’s voice against the persecuted, every man’s violence against the innocent. No wonder, then, that she drank gall in every cup, and ate poisoned bread.

  Then came his most venomous opportunity.

  He had attained a precarious peace with England. Charles the First had sent as his ambassador to France, the illustrious and handsome George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He became a great favorite at the French Court, for he was gay and subtle, ingenious and brilliant, charming and witty. From the first, it was evident that he pitied the beautiful young queen, moving in her pale isolation and misery among her remorseless enemies. From that pity had sprung his love. He was the more inclined to fix his attention upon her when he saw the dreadful enmity of Richelieu. At first, he had been amused, had said to himself: “The minions of that black and monstrous hierarchy find none too helpless, too obscure, too young or soft, for their vicious and fiendish attentions.” But later, he saw that there was a personal element in all this, and he discovered the lust and passion of the Cardinal.

  George Villiers found all men amusing, but it was an amusement without rancor, for he was, at heart, a young man much in love with life. He particularly found the Cardinal’s mature passion amusing, though later he was impressed by its satanic violence and power. It had the grotes-querie of a giant’s obsession for a delicate fairy. Still later, the young Duke began to frown uneasily.

  He was, first of all, an Englishman. The peace between England and France, brought about by the subtlety of Richelieu who wished no ally for the German Protestants, was as tenuously balanced as a sword upon a pen-point. A breath would disturb it. Buckingham wished no breath to stir the thunderous air. So, when Richelieu began his whispers in Paris about an alleged and unclean love-affair between the Queen and the young Duke, Buckingham was inordinately dismayed. He returned to London with a precipitateness which cast no aspersion on his personal bravery, but was solely occasioned by alarm lest the peace be destroyed between the two peoples. The storm must inevitably break, but British caution, as always, advised that the breaking be postponed as long as possible. In that caution was the English maxim that all men, given enough time, must die. A postponed war might often become an indefinitely postponed war.

  But the absence of Buckingham did nothing to abate the whispers. The Queen was snickeringly accused of corresponding with her lover, of meeting him in secret rendezvous on French soil.

  And now, the incredible was occurring in the mind and soul of that strange and terrible man, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu. His hatred and venom against Buckingham aroused his sleeping animosity and loathing for all that was English. His caution was dissolved like a strand of silk in a fire. There is nothing like a war to unify a people, he said, with increasing frequency. Historian though he was, he refused to remember that wars destroy the victor as well as the vanquished. Madness had seized his mind.

  He thought of all these things as he lay in his bed this summer morning. He allowed the destructive and drowning tide of his thoughts to inundate him. He remembered everything, and everything was colored by his fever, his passion, his frustration and despair.

  And as he thought, his disgust for all men rose up in him like malignant black bile, and disgust for himself. In his own dishonor, he felt the dishonor of all other men; in his sickness for himself, was a sickness for the whole world. He felt in himself all the malevolence, all the viciousness, stupidity, shame, degradation, cruelty, obtuseness, bestiality and meanness of all his fellow creatures. There is not a beast, he thought, with that brutal clarity in which he regarded himself, that would not be ashamed of claiming kinship with us.

  He remembered his youth, his single-heartedness, his soldier’s simplicity, his steadfast eyes and indomitable faith. He was incredulous, remembering. He looked at the far outline and faint lineaments of a stranger. And was wearily amused. But even in those days he had been instinctively disingenuous, otherwise he would never have abandoned his military career for the gown. He remembered a conversation he had had in those days with a devoted Jesuit, a friend of his father’s. The Jesuit had maintained that the Church had so
lely for its object the spread of Christendom, and that all methods must serve that end, that the Church must oppose all those who first thought of temporal things, whether gownsman or soldier or king. The Jesuit, who had been a singularly simple and noble man for one belonging to a sinister and dangerous order, had considered that the Church must serve the welfare of men, and bring them into the fold with gentleness and mercy and saintliness, despising the means of power, and always opposing tyrants and oppressors.

  But Richelieu, on the eve of renouncing his military career, had said:

  “To survive, and grow stronger, the Church must always serve the powerful, ride in their train. To espouse the cause of the suffering and the oppressed is the first step to oblivion, to hunger, death and impotence. No sensible man, then, no hierarchy of vast aim and ambition, can afford a promiscuous Christianity or sentimental humanitarianism.”

  From the first, then, he had seen the Church, not as the server of God and the protector of the helpless, but as a world-organization bent on temporal power and mighty princes. He saw it, too, as the servant of himself, and France. Remembering the lonely, sweet-faced Jesuit, he smiled contemptuously. That man had been a crier in the wilderness, despised by his colleagues who were blood-brothers of Armand-Jean du Plessis, prince of the Church of Rome.

  It served him well, that Church who was the inheritor of all the taboos and superstitions and paganisms of the centuries, and whose Christianity was the fog behind which it inexorably and fatally carried on its plottings against the enlightenment and freedom of men, against the souls of men. He used it, cleverly, and with enormous wisdom.