The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [85]
Madame de Guéménée stopped dead in the middle of a sentence and dropped the book on her lap. The ladies all rose. A deep silence ensued.
As for the King, he strode rudely past the ladies and stopped squarely in front of the Queen.
“Madame,” he said hoarsely, “you are about to receive a visit from the Chancellor who will communicate to you certain matters with which I have charged him.”
The unhappy Queen, ceaselessly threatened with divorce, exile and even trial at law, paled under her rouge and automatically inquired:
“But why this visit, Sire? What can the Chancellor tell me that Your Majesty cannot himself tell me?”
For all answer, the King turned on his heel just as the Captain of the Guards, Monsieur de Guitant, announced the Chancellor. By the time Monsieur Séguier, Chancellor and Keeper of the Seals, appeared, the King had vanished through another door. Séguier entered, half smiling, half blushing.
Séguier was by nature the drollest of men. He owed his success to the fact that Des Roches Le Masle, a canon of Notre Dame, who had once served the Cardinal, had referred him to Richelieu as a completely reliable man. The Cardinal trusted him and found no cause to regret it.
Séguier was the subject of numerous anecdotes not the least of which is the following.
After a stormy youth, he retired to a monastery to expiate, for a while at least, the follies of his adolescence. But on entering this holy place, the penitent could not shut the door behind him fast enough to prevent his besetting temptations from following him in. Relentlessly they obsessed him. When he confessed this to the Superior, the latter, seeking to protect him as much as possible, recommended that to exorcise the demon of temptation, Séguier resort to the bell-rope, pulling it with all his might. At the tell-tale clangor, his fellow-monks would know that one of their brothers was being beleaguered by Satan; and the entire community would forthwith take to their prayers.
To the future Chancellor and Keeper of the Seals, this advice seemed eminently sound. He fell heartily to work exorcising the Evil Spirit by dint of the long, frequent and effortful prayers of his fellows. But Satan was not to be so readily dislodged from a bastion so comfortable, familiar and stalwart. Accordingly, fast as the monks increased their supplications, Satan redoubled his temptations so that the bell clanged full-peal day and night.
So extreme was the penitent’s desire for mortification that presently the monks no longer had a moment’s respite. Day and night they did nothing but walk upstairs and down to chapel. Their ordinary duties called for matins at midnight, for lauds at sunrise, for prime at six, terce at nine, sext at noon, none at three, vespers at sunset and compline at nine. Now over and above these prayers they were forced to leap up from their bedside, or forsake their work, or forfeit their recreation at any moment and prostrate themselves, night and day, in cell, shop or garden.
Whether Satan abandoned the struggle or the monks grew weary of it remains unknown. But within three arduous months Séguier reappeared in the world with the reputation of having been possessed of the Devil more thoroughly than any man on record.
Forsaking monastic life, Séguier took to the law . . . was promoted President of the High Court in his uncle’s stead . . . embraced the Cardinalist Party, which showed no little wisdom on his part . . . became Chancellor . . . served His Eminence with zeal in the latter’s successive hatred of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria . . . prompted the judges in the Chalais affair . . . encouraged the activities of Monsieur de Laffemas . . . and finally invested with the Cardinal’s complete confidence—so richly earned—he attained the singular commission he was now about to execute. . . .
As Séguier entered the Queen was still standing as etiquette demanded until the King had left. The moment he entered she sat down and motioned to her ladies to be seated