Alexandre Dumas - The Last Cavalier - Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon

The young man held out his perfectly gloved hand and put the money in his pocket without counting it. “And now,” said the young dandy, “should I give back the Limousin’s two louis?”

“What do you mean? The Limousin’s two louis?” asked Fouché.

“The two louis you gave me a few minutes ago.”

“I gave them to you?”

“Yes, and to prove it, here they are.”

“Well,” said Fouché, “in that case this third stack is also yours—consider it a bonus. Now, go on, waste no more time. I want information this evening.”

“You will have what you need.” The agent walked out as pleased with Fouché as Fouché was pleased with him.

Later that evening, Fouché received the first dispatch:

I’ve taken a room in the Hotel L’Unité, Rue de la Loi, and my neighbor is Sol de Grisolles. From the balcony that connects our four windows, I was able to see how his room is arranged. A sofa, ideal for conversation, is set right against my wall. I’ve made a hole, almost invisible, allowing me to see and hear everything. The citizen Sol de Grisolles, who did not find the person he was looking for at the Mont-Blanc Hotel, will wait for him until two in the morning. He has alerted the Hotel L’Unité that one of his friends would be coming to see him late.

I will be the unsuspected third party to their conversation.

The Limousin

PS: Tomorrow, first thing, I’ll send a second dispatch.

The next morning as day was breaking, Fouché was greeted with a second message with the following information:

The friend the citizen Sol de Grisolles was expecting is the famous Laurent, called handsome Laurent, head of the Companions of Jehu. The order that Cadoudal’s aide-de-camp delivered to Laurent was that all the affiliates of the famous company should be reminded of the oaths they have taken. Next Saturday they will be resuming their attacks, first by stopping the stagecoach from Rouen to Paris in the Vernon forest. Whoever is not at his post will be punished by death.

The citizen Sol de Grisolles is leaving at ten in the morning for Germany. I’ll be leaving with him. We will pass through Strasbourg, and as best I can understand, we are going to the residence of Monsieur le Duc d’Enghien.

The Limousin

The two messages fell like two rays of sunshine on Fouché’s chessboard, and they allowed the Minister of Police who was “on the way out” a clearpicture of Cadoudal’s own chess game. Cadoudal had not made an empty threat to Bonaparte by declaring a vendetta. For at the same time he was reactivating the Companions of Jehu, to whom he had given conditional leave, and he was now sending his aide-de-camp all the way to see the Duc d’Enghien. He was tired, no doubt, of the way the Comte d’Artois and his son kept hesitating. They were the only princes with whom Cadoudal had been in contact, and though they were always promising to send him money and men and to grant him their royal protection, they had never come through. Now he was going directly to the last member of the Condé family, that warrior race, to find out if he would be willing to provide more effective aid than simply his encouragement and best wishes.

Once his devices were set, Fouché would wait patiently, like a spider at the edge of its web.

That day, in both Vernon and Les Andelys, near the highway from Paris to Rouen, the gendarmerie received the order to keep their horses saddled day and night.

MONSIEUR LE DUC D’ENGHIEN LIVED in the little Ettenheim chateau, on the right bank of the Rhine about twenty kilometers from Strasbourg in the Grand-Duchy of Baden. He was the grandson of the Prince de Condé, who was himself the son of the one-eyed Prince de Condé who cost France so dearly during the regency of Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans. Just one Condé, and he died young, separated the one-eyed duke from the Condé whose victories at Thionville and in the Battle of Nördlingen won him the name The Great Condé. His great greed, rotten morals, and cold cruelty proved him indeed to be the son of his father, Henri II de Bourbon. Condé’s strong desire to occupy the French throne prompted him to disclose that Anne d’Autriche’s two sons, Louis XIV and the Duc d’Orléans, were not in fact the sons of Louis XIII, which could easily have been true.

It was with Henri II de Bourbon that the celebrated Condé family changed character. No longer generous, it became greedy; no longer gay, it became melancholic. Although history states that he was the son of Henri I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, chronicles from that time protest against the filiation and assign him a quite different father. Apparently Henri I’s wife, the duchess Charlotte de la Trémouille, had been living in adultery with a Gascon page when suddenly, after a four-month absence, her husband returned home with no warning. The duchess quickly made a grim decision; after all, an adulterous woman is already halfway down the road to a murder. She afforded her husband a royal welcome. Although it was wintertime, she managed to find some lovely fruits, and with him she shared the most beautiful pear in the basket. The knife she used to cut the pear had a golden blade, and one side of it had been bathed with poison. The prince died that very night.

Charles de Bourbon reported the news of the death to Henri IV, and attributed the cause to papal decree: “His death was caused by Pope Sixtus V’s excommunication,” he said. “Yes,” Henri IV replied, never one to pass up an opportunity to be witty, “the excommunication didn’t hurt, but something else lent a hand .”

An investigation was opened, and serious charges were leveled against Charlotte de Trémouille. Henri IV asked that all the trial documents be delivered to him, and then threw every bit of them into the fire. When he was asked the reasons for his unusual action, he replied simply, “It is better for a bastard to inherit the Condé name than for such a great name to disappear forever.”

So a bastard did inherit the Condé name, and he brought into that parasitic branch of the once noble family vices that had rather go unnamed. Rebellion, certainly, was the least of them.

Our position is different from that of other novelists. If we fail to report such details, we are accused of not knowing history any better than some historians. And if we do reveal them, then we are accused of trying to sully the reputation of the royal families.

But let us hasten to add that the young prince Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon had none of the failings of his father, Henri II de Bourbon, who, had he not been imprisoned for three years, would never have come back to his wife, though she was the most beautiful creature of the time. And none of the failings of the Great Condé, whose amorous relationship with Madame de Longueville, his sister, were the talk of Paris during the Fronde; or of Louis de Condé, who, while he was regent of France, simply emptied the state’s coffers into his own and those of Madame de Prie.

No, the young prince Louis-Antoine was a fine-looking young man of thirty-three years. He had emigrated with his father and the Comte d’Artois, and in ’92 he had joined the corps of émigrés that had gathered along the Rhine. For eight years he had been at war against France, it is true, but he fought in order to combat principles that his princely education and royal bias forbade him to support. When Condé’s army was disbanded, as it was after the Lunéville peace treaty, the Duc d’Enghien could have moved to England, as had his father, his grandfather, other princes, and most of the émigrés. But because of a love affair no one knew about then, although it has become common knowledge since, he chose to set up residence, as we have said, in Ettenheim.