The Cat and the King by Louis Auchincloss

to marry a bastard? Yes! It is probably the only thing I would have refused him. I’d have cut my throat had he bade me to. But to make a match so degrading... never! And I’m not a grandson of France!”
    â€œConti’s brother didn’t worry about it,” Chartres pointed out sullenly, glancing at his cousin, who had turned to the great portrait of Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne. “
He
was the one who started the fashion.”
    â€œAh, but he died of the shame of it,” Conti replied, without turning his gaze from the great cardinal. “He is a sorry precedent to cite. I wonder what old Hawkeye here would have said. I think he would have kept the royal blood pure. Look at the history in this gallery! The men who made France great. Guesclin, Montfort, Bayard, Dunois, look at them all, nobles and warriors. Why, the room seems to throb with the muffled sound of their tramping feet! Surely they would not have bowed to the spawn of Montespan and Vallière!”
    Had the mocking note disappeared from Conti’s velvet tone? Was I making a fool of myself in thinking that I could detect even a faint tremor of something like passion in it, passion that he had always professed to consider as not in the best of taste in a society that worshiped the superficial, a society he both deplored and enjoyed? He walked several paces down the gallery and paused before Jeanne d’Arc. “I suppose if this dear lady were alive today she’d ask for the rank of foreign princess, like our silly Lorraine friends. But she lived in a nobler time.” He turned now and walked deliberately back to Chartres. “Believe me, cousin,” he said in his gentlest tone, “your father will bless you for your disobedience. Nobody cares for our blood more than Monsieur. Nobody has cared more for the prestige of our house. To see his only son misallied might be as fatal to him as a bad marriage was to my brother. He may give in to the king out of momentary weakness, but he will repent of it later. And then how he will cherish you for standing out!”
    The double doors at the end of the gallery were now flung open, as is done only for a son of France, and we stiffened to attention. Monsieur came briskly in, his high heels clicking on the parquet. He was a fantastic combination of inconsistencies: dignity and effeminacy; authority and coyness; serenity and nerves. His head, with the huge black perruque, beady eyes and large, aquiline, Medicean nose, rose from a mass of ruff, ribbons and diamonds like an owl’s above a messy nest. The Chevalier, who followed him, had a boy’s face at sixty, a handsome boy’s face, but there was something tight and sinister about that unlined skin. One felt it might suddenly crack, like an aged apple.
    â€œHave I interrupted you young people in some naughty project?” Monsieur demanded, looking with a malignant gleam from one to the other of us. “I trust my disreputable son is not leading you gentlemen into trouble? You, too, Savonne? Beware of him!”
    â€œOn the contrary, Monsieur, I’m afraid I was boring these young men with a lecture in history,” Conti replied, indicating the Champaigne portrait. “I was holding forth on the domestic policies of the great cardinal.”
    â€œA very capable man. But people exaggerate his accomplishments. They give him credit for everything that was done in my father’s reign.”
    â€œMay I take the liberty of saying how passionately I agree with your royal highness!” I burst out. “I have always regarded Louis XIII as the greatest of our monarchs! I learned it at my father’s knee.”
    Monsieur cackled merrily. “Don’t let my brother catch you saying so! But it’s all right, Saint-Simon. Your father was a good man and a loyal friend. He told me some funny stories about the cardinal. Do you know that when Richelieu lived here, he used to have apoplectic