The Presentation

It was the night of the Duc de Choiseul’s ball, that is to say, the night before the expected presentation of the Comtesse Dubarry at Court, and Versailles was in a ferment, the seething of which reached to the meanest streets of Paris.

France had long been accustomed to the rule, not of kings, but of favourites and ministers, and at the present moment in the year of our Lord, 1770, she was under the rule of the most kind-hearted of women since the harmless La Vallière and the most upright minister since Colbert.

The mistress was Dubarry and the minister de Choiseul.

It was a strange government. To-day Dubarry, who hated Choiseul much more than she hated the devil, would be in the ascendant over Louis the Voluptuous. To-morrow Choiseul would have the long ear of the King, who was, in fact, only the table on which these two gamblers played with loaded dice for the realm of France.

Behind the two gamblers stood their backers. Behind Choiseul, when he was winning, nearly the whole Court of Versailles. Behind Dubarry, when she was losing, only her family, the Vicomte Jean, and a few inconsiderable people who had learned to love her for her own sake.

This adherence of the courtiers to Choiseul was caused less by the prescience of self-interest than by hatred of the Comtesse, and this hatred, always smouldering and ready to burst into flame, was one of the strangest features in the Court mind of France.

Why did they hate her, these people? Or, rather, why did they hate her with such intensity—they who had raised few enough murmurs against the rule of the frigid and callous Pompadour?

They hated her, perhaps, because she was an epitome of the virtues and the vices of the people whom they had trampled under foot for centuries. She had that goodness of heart and simplicity of thought rarer even than rectitude in Court circles, and her very vices had a robustness reminiscent of the soil.

Dubarry was, in fact, a charming woman who might have been a good woman but for Fate, the Maison Labille, and Louis of France.

The question of her presentation at Court, an act which would place her on the same social footing as her enemies, had been the main topic of conversation for a month past. The women had closed their ranks and united against the common enemy. Not one of them would act as sponsor. The King, who cared little enough about the business, had, still, interested himself in the matter. The Comtesse, her sister Chon, and the Vicomte Jean Dubarry had ransacked the lists of the most venial of the nobility. Bribes, threats, promises, all had been used in vain; not a woman would stir or raise a finger to further the ambition of the “shop girl,” so that the unfortunate Comtesse was on the point of yielding to despair when a brilliant idea occurred to the Vicomte Jean.

Away down in the provinces, mouldering in a castle on the banks of the Meuse, lived a lady named the Comtesse de Béarn. A lady of the old régime, a litigant with a suit pending before the courts in Paris, poor as Job, proud as Lucifer, and seemingly created by Providence for the purpose of the presentation.

This lady had been brought to Paris by a trick, installed in the town house of Madame Dubarry, and wheedled into consenting to act as sponsor by pure and rank bribery. One can fancy the consternation of the Choiseul party when this news leaked out.

The presentation was assured; nothing, one might fancy, could possibly happen to prevent it, and yet to-night, standing with the Duchess to receive their guests, the face of Choiseul showed nothing of his threatened defeat.

The Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré was alight with the torches of the running footmen and filled with a crowd watching the carriages turning into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Choiseul from the direction of the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue de la Bonne Morue, the Rue d’Anjou, and the Rue de la Madeleine.

It was a great assemblage, for the Court for the moment was in Paris, the King having changed his residence for three days, returning to Versailles on the morrow, and the people, with that passion for display which helped them at times to forget their misery and hunger, watched the passing liveries of the Duc de Richelieu, M. de Duras, M. de Sartines, the Duc de Grammont, and the host of other notabilities, content if by the torchlight they caught a glimpse of some fair face, the glimmer of a jewel, or the ribbon of an order.

The Maréchal de Richelieu’s carriage had drawn away from the steps, having set down its illustrious occupant, when another carriage drew up, from which stepped two young men. The first to alight was short, dark, with a face slightly pitted with smallpox, and so repellent, that at first sight the mind recoiled from him. Yet such was the extraordinary vigour and personality behind that repulsive face that men, and more especially women, forgot the ugliness in the hypnotism of the power. This was the celebrated Comte Camus, a descendant of Nicholas Camus, who had arrived in France penniless in the reign of Louis XIII., married his daughter to Emery, superintendent of finance, and died leaving to his heirs fifteen million francs.

The gentleman with him, tall, fair complexioned, and with a laughing, devil-may-care face, marred somewhat by a sword-cut on the right side reaching from cheek-bone to chin, was the Comte de Rochefort.

Rochefort was only twenty-five, an extraordinary person, absolutely fearless, always fighting, one of those characters that, like opals, seem compounded of cloud and fire. Generous, desperate in his love and hate, a rake-hell and a roué, open-handed when his fist was not clenched, and always laughing, he was fittingly summed up in the words of his cousin, the Abbé du Maurier, “It grieves me to think that such a man should be damned.”

Rochefort, followed by Camus, passed up the steps and through the glass swing-doors to the hall. It was like entering a palace in fairy-land. Flowers everywhere, clinging to the marble pillars, gloated on by the soft yet brilliant lights of a thousand lamps, and banking with colour the balustrades of the great staircase up which was passing a crowd of guests, or, one might better say, a profusion of diamonds, orders, blue ribbons, billowing satin, and the snow of lace and pearls. Over the light laughter and soft voices of women the music of Philidor drifted, faintly heard, from the band of violins in the ball-room, and, clear-cut and hard through the murmur and sigh of violins, voices and volumes of drapery, could be heard the business-like voice of the major-domo announcing the guests.

“Monsieur le Maréchal Duc de Richelieu!”

“Madame la Princesse de Guemenée!”

“Madame de Courcelles!” etc.

Camus and Rochefort, having made their bow to Madame de Choiseul and saluted the minister, lost each other completely. Each had a host of acquaintances, and Rochefort had not made two steps in the direction of the ball-room when a hand was laid on his arm and, turning, he found himself face to face with Monsieur de Sartines, the Lieutenant-General of Police.

“Is this an arrest, monsieur?” said Rochefort, laughing.

“Only of your attention,” replied de Sartines, laughing in his turn. “My dear Rochefort, how well you are looking. And what has brought you here to-night?”

“Just what brought you, my dear Sartines.”

“And that?”

“The invitation of Choiseul.”

“But I thought you were of the other party?”

“Which other party?”

“The Dubarry faction.”

“I—I belong to no faction—only my own, and that includes all the pretty women and pleasant fellows in Paris. Mordieu, Sartines, since when have you imagined me a man of factions and politics? I keep clear of all that simply because I wish to live. Look at Richelieu, he has aged more in the last six months with hungering after Choiseul’s portfolio than he aged in the whole eighty years of his life. Look at Choiseul grinning at Richelieu, whom he expects to devour him; he has no more wrinkles simply because he has no more room for them. Look at yourself. You are as yellow as a louis d’or, and your liver can’t grow any bigger on account of the size of your spleen—politics, all politics.”

“I!” said Sartines. “I have nothing to do with politicians—my business is with criminals.”

“They are the same thing, my dear man,” replied Rochefort. “The criminals stab each other in the front and the politicians in the back; that is all the difference. Ah, here we are in the ball-room. More flowers! Why, Choiseul must have stripped France of roses for this ball of his.”

“Yes, but there is a Rose that he has failed to pluck with all these roses.”

“Dubarry?”

“Precisely.”

Though Rochefort pretended to know nothing of politics, his acute mind told him at once a secret hidden from others. Sartines belonged to the Dubarry faction. He read it at once in the remark and the tone in which it was made.

Sartines moved through the circles of the Court, mysterious, secretive, professing no politics, yet with his thumb in every pie, and sometimes his whole hand.

He was Fouché with the aristocratic particle attached—a policeman and a noble rolled into one. With the genius of Mascarille for intrigue, of Tartuffe for hypocrisy, acting now with the feigned stupidity of a Sganarelle, and always ready to pounce with the pitilessness of a tiger, this extraordinary man exercised a power in the Court of Louis XV., equalled only by the power of the grey cardinal in the time of Richelieu—with this difference—he was feared less, on account of his assumed bonhomie, an attribute that made him even more dangerous than son éminence gris.