Chapter 18
Besançon
November 1636
At the time Marguerite arrived, Rohan’s quarters had been too cramped for his suddenly-increased household, given that they consisted of two rooms in the former Hôtel Jouffroy, which over time had become the Inn of the Green Lion, one of which had provided sleeping quarters for him and his long-time confidential secretary, Benjamin Priolo, a clergyman’s son from St.-Jean-d’Angély, one of the French cities where the Rohans held governorships. The other had served as parlor, library, office, and general all-purpose room. He used to eat out. He had been fond of his view, though, which included the old Roman bridge across the river that gave access to the city proper.
Two rooms would not do once he had a daughter in residence, for a daughter involved a chaperone, a couple of ladies-in-waiting, a couple of maids at a minimum, a kitchen, a cook . . . His mind had boggled, so he had called a real estate agent and they were now occupying half of the Hôtel de Buyer in the main part of the town, at an utterly exorbitant rent. But it was, at least, a modern house, built during the previous century in the Italian style, far less drafty than the older medieval ones. Moreover, he had a private study to which he could retreat when the level of female chatter became unendurable. He left Priolo in his old rooms in the Green Lion and used those as his office when he was on the grand duke’s business. Early morning walks were beneficial to an aging man’s health, after all, and he found the thought that the up-time encyclopedias said that he would be dead in two more years rather discouraging, even if Bernhard did keep repeating that he had, after all, been killed in a battle that there would be no need to fight in this version of God’s creation.
Security, he thought. The followers of Ducos would not, perhaps, be indifferent to the chance to attack him, and by extension attack him through his household members. He added six footmen to the household staff, two to be on duty at all times. As Bernhard did not require him to make a stylish appearance in court society, he did not hire matched sets of well-built young men, but rather unmatched sets of recently retired non-coms. He hoped that what they lacked in elegance, they would compensate for in vigilance.
Marguerite’s arrival was not the only cause for the restructuring of his household, though. “I,” he had announced one day at dinner, “have decided to write a treatise on up-time assumptions and attitudes.” In the comparative peace of his new study/library, he had been thinking about this for several weeks. Being far too busy a man to go visit Grantville and study his subjects in situ, he asked the grand duke for some of the up-timers already in Besançon to supplement his reading.
Using Marguerite’s arrival as a rationale (and at the mischief-making suggestion of Gerry Stone by way of Ruvigny), the grand duke had generously complied by transferring those up-timers he had by now determined were least useful for his purposes—namely Madame Calagna and a couple of youthful females, the nearly grown daughters of Mesdames Calagna and Dunn—keeping the specialists in medicine and the mechanical arts for himself.
Carey Calagna had never anticipated that when the duc de Rohan’s marriageable daughter made it out of France and out of the grasp of the new King Gaston’s matrimonial machinations, that she would be transferred to the status of combination English and up-time government tutor and senior chaperone for said daughter and also consultant to the duke. It was temporary, Bernhard promised, until Rohan’s sister arrived to serve as the female head of his no-longer-bachelor household.
Bernhard, born a duke of Saxe-Weimar and now by conquest and self-aggrandizement the grand duke of the Free County of Burgundy, had hired her to explain to his bureaucrats how up-time government worked. She wasn’t entirely sure that the grand duke’s representatives understood precisely where her unfinished college major in business administration and prior employment as Grantville’s probate court clerk after the Ring of Fire had placed her in the overall hierarchy of “up-time experts” when they went through on their recruiting trip, but she and Kamala had packed up and moved to Burgundy. Kamala had been more successful with her medical and public health duties than Carey with her instructional ones. Only a few of the grand duke’s staff had either the time or inclination to listen to her.
By a happy chance, those least useful to the grand duke would be the most useful to Rohan. As Marguerite had explained to Carey, by appointing to his daughter’s household up-timers who were, if not Calvinist, at least not Catholic like Susanna Allegretti, the duke could, for the time being, manage to equally offend all the families of French Huguenot nobility who thought that such appointments should go to their wives and daughters, but not offend any of them particularly, and thus not exacerbate rivalries among his potential supporters should something happen. Most of the French Huguenot community would not care that the up-timers now resident in the ducal household, unlike Priolo, could help elucidate the deeper meaning contained in the collected works of Dr. Seuss.
Something, Carey suspected, was the revocation of the ducal exile. She personally thought, just based on reading the newspapers, that something might happen when hell froze over, but so far no one had asked her opinion on that matter.
The two Dr. Seuss books that Gerry Stone had asked Ron to send for Marguerite had arrived. She read about the adventures of Horton the Elephant, with assistance from her new up-time ladies-in-waiting, Shae Horton and Dominique Bell, with mild interest. Yertle the Turtle now reposed in the study of Henri duc de Rohan, who read and re-read it with utter fascination and deep concentration. Then he confiscated the other two books for his own use and hired a researcher in the SoTF State Library to find out more about Seuss and his works. The researcher ate well for several weeks; the expanded Rohan household somewhat less so. The money had to come from somewhere.
“ . . . so since he also holds the rank of prince étranger because of his descent from the ruling house of Brittany before it was incorporated into the territories of the French crown, Papa is not only entitled to be formally addressed as ‘Your Highness’ rather than ‘Your Grace’ although the up-timers in general do not appear to have learned this, but he also has the right to wear a hat in the presence of the king at receptions for newly appointed ambassadors from other countries. Thus, he is of precisely equal rank to the older brother of General Turenne. Turenne is a cadet of the house of La Tour d’Auvergne. Turenne’s brother is still in fact as well as in law the independent ruler of Sedan, although not for long, if that usurper Monsieur Gaston has his way. Papa also has a hereditary claim to Bouillon in the Spanish Netherlands. I believe that Papa, when he was young, truly wished to carve out an independent principality such as Sedan for himself, as the grand duke has done here in Burgundy. For a while, before King Louis was born, Papa was the nearest heir to Navarre. It would have been nice for the house of Rohan to acquire Navarre.” Marguerite ended her lengthy disquisition on the finer points of court protocol as they applied to the ducs de Rohan in a rush of words followed by a regretful sigh.
Carey’s mind wandered. She had not expected to learn as much as she taught, if not more than she taught. Or, since she had vaguely expected that she would learn a lot of new stuff, she hadn’t expected it to include a practical survival guide for the courtiers who surrounded the kings of France. It was just weird that her daughter Dominique, only five or so years younger than the perpetually chattering Marguerite, duchesse de Rohan, was now a lady-in-waiting for said duchesse, along with Kamala’s daughter Shae Horton. That was temporary, also, until Marguerite’s aunt could sift through the competing claims and desires of various prominent Huguenot families.
Carey winced, forcing herself not to give a frazzled pull at her straight brown Dutch boy bob. She and Kamala Dunn cut one another’s hair these days, and the kids’ hair too, with a little home barber kit that she wouldn’t sell for a fortune. Well, maybe, if they didn’t get electricity in Besançon in the next few years and she was faced with paying college tuition, she would sell the clippers out of it for a fortune . . . though the kit as a whole in its original box would be worth much more to a collector than an individual piece and maybe she could wear a braid . . .
When Carey resurfaced from her internal monologue, Marguerite had finished with court protocol, but she was still talking, having moved on to the ever-fascinating (at least to a lot of people, both up-time and down-time, but not to her current audience) discipline of genealogy. “Our senior line of Rohan descends from René I de Rohan, who died in 1552 and held the titles of vicomte de Rohan, prince de Léon, comte de Porhoët, seigneur de Beauvoir and de La Garnache. In his day, the feudal holdings in Brittany were still important. Even Papa was born at Blain.”
The rattle of French continued nonstop until Marguerite yawned. “I have to go to bed. The idea that I should become Rohan for myself frightened Papa so much that now he expects that I will come to him for two hours every morning, right after he rises and before breakfast, to receive lessons on being Rohan. Which is not much like it seemed to be when I lived in Paris with Maman. Since Papa rises three hours before dawn, I suppose I can only be grateful that there is hardly any social life in Besançon.”
It was temporary. Both Grand Duke Bernhard and the duc de Rohan had assured Carey of that, and she hung onto the word as to a lifeline in a tempest. Toward the end of November, Rohan’s spinster sister, Marguerite’s Tante Anne, would arrive to become the female head of her brother’s expanded, no-longer-bachelor, household.
Well, errr. She was supposed to arrive. What actually arrived was a letter. It appeared, according to Marguerite’s report, that Uncle Soubise also requested Mademoiselle Anne’s services, and she opted to stay inside the borders of France and help him hold the Rohan banner high.
“In fact,” Marguerite told Dominique and Shae, “Tante Anne rather ranted about Papa’s imprudence in having taken me to Burgundy, because while my personal safety is one consideration, she says that if the family is to maintain its standing and influence at the court, its members have to be at the court, whichever court it may be, and the family needs to decide which direction they will throw their support in the matter of Gaston’s troubles. That’s pretty much what Maman said, too, the last time she wrote.”
That might be the only subject upon which the two sisters-in-law agreed.
“Then Tante Anne asked a dozen questions. Has Papa been in contact with the king in the Low Counties? Does he know where Anne of Austria and her son are? Has he heard what Mazarin was currently up to and . . . ? Well, also,” Marguerite said, “she wrote something unflattering about Maman and Candale and whatever they are up to. Papa did not read that part to me, but I will find out, I assure you. Then she finished by saying that Papa should rely on his brother and sister and it was much more important for them both to be in Paris than for her to come here.”
Rohan said to Carey that his sister was legendarily stubborn—this referencing her willingness to accept imprisonment after the defeat of the Huguenots at La Rochelle rather than be included in the amnesty and her several years of captivity, along with their equally stubborn mother, at the Château de Niort in the aftermath. Under the circumstances, he requested that Carey and her daughter, along with Shae Horton, remain in his household for longer than the original appointment.
Carey agreed. It had dawned on her that refusing the “requests” of dukes, unless one had an extraordinarily good reason indeed, simply was not done. In theory, demander was supposed to translate into English as “ask,” but she was developing doubts that it was as much of a “false friend” word as it was reputed to be by the grammar textbooks. Certainly not when one was living this far from Grantville and being paid by a down-timer. Requests and demands tended to skip down Shakespeare’s primrose path arm in arm with one another.
Kamala agreed to keep Ashlyn, who was almost the same age as Kamala’s Shaun, along with little Joe, who had been born after the Ring of Fire, in what had been (and, she hoped, would again be) their joint apartment as long as Carey kept paying her half of the rent and three-fourths of the wages of their full-time babysitter.
“I think you would have liked Tante Anne if she had come,” Marguerite said. “Just like Grand-mère Rohan was, she is highly educated and knows several languages, including Latin, of course. Less Greek, but even while she was in prison after La Rochelle, she found some wandering Scotsman to tutor her and used the time to learn English. She is still strong and healthy, even though during the last weeks of the siege of La Rochelle the inhabitants were reduced to living on four ounces of bread per day, or less, or worse, and many people there got sick and died. She is talented and brave, a patroness of Mademoiselle Schurman in Utrecht. She writes poetry, too, although in my estimation it is far from being the best poetry in the world. In fact, it is not very good. But some of it is interesting, especially the poems she did for her sister, Tante Henriette, who died about a dozen years ago, back when she was in love with the duchess of Mantua-Nevers.”
“With the duke?” Carey asked cautiously, still a bit uncertain of rapidly-spoken French.
“Oh, no. With the duchess,” Marguerite answered with good cheer. “It is called Sapphic love. Tante Henriette was quite heartbroken when the duchess died.”
“I, ah, see.”
“When we go back to Paris, because we surely will, because Tante Anne is right that I cannot stay in exile permanently if Rohan is to maintain its position in France, I will take you and Shae and Dominique. Then you can come with me to the salons, because I like femmes savantes much better than Maman does, and meet many interesting intellectual ladies.”
That evening, Carey commented to Kamala Dunn that she was less than enthralled by any such prospect. “I signed up for Burgundy,” she said, “not Paris.”
“Ask Marcie Abruzzo and Matt Trelli,” was Kamala’s answer. “I think they’ve learned that when you work for Grand Duke Bernhard and Archduchess Claudia, you go where you’re sent. It’s along the same lines as the up-time proverb that if the army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one. It’s probably pretty much the same when you’re working for Rohan. They say ‘jump’ and your only question is ‘which way?’ There’s really no distinction between being a soldier and being a civilian employee as far as the seventeenth century is concerned.”
Paris
November 1636
“Of course, they know that I have someone watching them,” Soubise said. “It was pretty clever of them to figure out so quickly that it was Sandrart and let him know it. Just as we know that Bernhard and Henri have someone watching us. They didn’t lend us Colonel Raudegen’s assistance simply out of the goodness of their hearts. There are probably others.”
“Then find out who they are,” Mademoiselle Anne replied.
Soubise propped up his other foot. His sister was not only stubborn. She was impatient.