The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [253]
Accordingly His Eminence waited avidly for tidings from England to the effect that Buckingham would not come.
The question of storming the city was frequently debated in the Royal Council and invariably rejected. In the first place, its battlements seemed impregnable. Further whatever His Eminence might have said he realized that he could not set Frenchmen against Frenchmen. The horrors of a bloody civil war would have marked current policy as a retrogression to the savagery of sixty years before. His Eminence was what we of the nineteenth century call a man of progress. Indeed, in 1628, the sack of La Rochelle and the slaughter of three or four thousand Huguenots who would have borne too much resemblance to the Massacres of Saint Bartholemew in 1572. The King, staunch Catholic though he was, would not have objected in the least to such categoric and sanguinary measures. But he always bowed before the argument of the besieging generals; La Rochelle, they all agreed, was impregnable save by famine.
Often the Cardinal thought uncomfortably and with a certain fear of Milady. Her strange dual character . . . the mixture of beauty and horror in her . . . the dove, the lion, the snake. . . . Had she betrayed him? Was she dead? Friend or foe, acting for or against him, he knew that nothing save the greatest obstacles could immobilize a woman of her energy. But who could have set these obstacles in her path?
Fundamentally he felt he could rely on her and with reason. There must be something so ghastly in this woman’s past that only his red mantle could cover it. This woman was his own, his creature, for only in him could she find support stronger than the dangers which threatened her.
The stake he had in her being so tenuous, the Cardinal decided to wage war single-handed; any success from abroad would be a stroke of chance. He would continue to raise the famous dike which was to starve La Rochelle and, as it rose higher, day by day, he stared across at the unhappy city. What profound wretchedness and what heroic virtues it contained! The Cardinal thought of King Louis XI his political predecessor—as akin to himself as his successor Robespierre was to be—and he remembered the words of the King’s minister and toady, Tristan L’Hermite: “Divide in order to rule.”
Henry IV when besieging Paris had ordered his soldiers to toss bread and provisions over the walls to the enemy. His Eminence arranged for short notes to be tossed over the walls of La Rochelle in which he pointed out to its inhabitants how unjust, selfish and barbarous was the conduct of their leaders. These leaders, said the text, possessed wheat in abundance yet they would not share it with the population. Their slogan—for they had their slogans too—was that women, children and oldsters should die so long as those who manned the walls remained well-fed, healthy and strong.
Thanks to the loyalty of the citizens or to their inability to resist, this principle had not been universally adopted but it was partially observed; it had passed from theory to practice. Richelieu’s propaganda injured it considerably. It reminded the men that the luckless folk they allowed to die were their own wives, children and parents. The evident conclusion was that if all the inhabitants were reduced to a common misery such equal conditions must inevitably result in unanimity of decision.
These broadcasts met with all the effect their writer anticipated, for they determined a large number of inhabitants to open private negotiations with the Royal Army.
The Cardinal had cause to congratulate himself; his methods were bearing fruit and the future looked rosy. But at precisely this juncture a citizen of La Rochelle tossed a figurative bombshell into His Eminence’s real expectations. Despite the vigilance of Bassompierre, of Schomberg and of the Duc d’Angoulême, themselves under the Cardinal’s unflagging surveillance, a man of La Rochelle had regained the city from England with word that he had himself seen a splendid fleet in Portsmouth harbor ready to sail within a week.