Chapter 11
Paris
July 1636
“They can’t leave from the Hôtel de Sully,” Raudegen said. “I say that from a professional perspective. The Royal Guards have posted too many sentries. They can’t disappear from the court when they are attending the queen and princess. It’s not just that they are closely observed there, although they are. There are too many people milling around in random patterns. An escape party would run too much risk of encountering someone utterly unexpected.”
“Maybe they could leave from the Hôtel if there was a party going on,” Ruvigny commented. “Something like the ballet they held last summer. There would be a couple of hundred guests coming and going and a major congestion of horses, carriages, servants, caterers, etc.”
“Possibly.” Raudegen moved and looked down into the courtyard. “What kind of party?”
“We can check with Benserade. He’ll be glad to work for us again. He’s thankful now that he never succeeded in obtaining patronage from Richelieu and Mazarin.”
“It would be easiest for them to leave if it’s some kind of an outdoor production. Down in the courtyard there.”
Benserade, when consulted, pointed out that outdoor productions were subject to the vagaries of the weather. “Even better than a ballet, hire the new Théâtre du Marais. It’s in a remodeled tennis court on the Vieille Rue du Temple, right opposite the Capuchins. They renovated it two years ago, so it’s all modern. It wouldn’t be a good idea to use the Hôtel de Bourgogne, even though they’ve accumulated a lot of indoor sets over the years, because that theater had too many long-standing ties to Richelieu, plus the name . . . Bad association, given what Bernhard has done in Burgundy. Right now, they’re probably all thinking that locating it on the Rue Mauconseil was prophetic—very bad advice. It might offend the king for the duchesses to sponsor a production there.”
At this point, they had to take the new and better escape concept to the ladies themselves.
“Not a ballet again,” the duchess said. “It would be all too déjà vu. We must find something different. A contemporary play will be too dangerous.” Her voice was firm. “There are too many chances to offend. It will have to be a pastoral, classical theme. Comedy, not tragedy. Not a satire. Pyramus and Thisbe, perhaps?”
“Oh, Maman. That’s so overdone.”
“I want something incorporating dance and music with the dialogue,” the duchess continued. “Not an opera, because Mrs. Simpson is sponsoring operas in Magdeburg. Not a musical comedy, because the queen in the Netherlands is sponsoring musical comedies in Brussels. We need something else. Something that will not offend the king. Perhaps even something that will placate the king.”
Gerry’s thoughts turned to science fiction and fantasy. “You need the development of a scion from obscurity to glory. Scions are really good, like in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! Well, probably not just like Pratchett, considering how Carrot turns out at the end, no matter how great an author Pratchett is—was—will be—used to be—still is? Anyhow, focus on the scion. I must have read twenty books that go something like the following, by different authors. Or not so many different authors. Eddings used to write the same story over and over again. He just changed the names. Brooks did pretty much the same with the Shannara series. So to start, you’ve got this family living somewhere in Fantasia.”
“Fantasia?”
“Well, that’s an old Disney movie, but you can make it generic. There was this glorious book called The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land that came out a couple of years before the RoF. It was one of Diana Wynne Jones’ things. We have it at home, but that’s neither here nor there and you don’t need it to make this play.”
“Focus,” Bismarck said. “Focus.”
“You know what he’s talking about,” Ruvigny interjected. “Arcadia. Heroines named Amerinde and heroes named Cleonice. We’ve all read them.”
“Think about it, guys,” Gerry barreled on. “You won’t even need enough time for someone to compose new music. Oh, your composer will have to add the high notes and low notes and chords and such, but I can give you enough pre-cooked melodies to carry it off, since this thing won’t have a performance run.”
He pulled out his harmonica.
“First scene. The Birth of the Scion. Daddy, Mommy, and attendants admire the new prince. All you’ll need is a cradle and a spotlight. Someone sings, Sleep my child and peace attend thee, all through the night; guardian angels God will send thee, all through the night and everybody dances around the cradle. Somebody can translate it into French.
“And then he’s a toddler. Here’s the tune. Bimbo, Bimbo, when’re you gonna grow? Everybody loves the little baby Bimb-bi-o.” He bit his lip. “Don’t use the word ‘bimbo.’ Some of the professional actors are bound to have little kids who are used to being around the theater and won’t freeze on stage.”
Benserade nodded. “One of Béjart’s boys will do. The little one—Louis, I think his name is.”
“Then the scion turns into a teenager and all his wonderful, extraordinary, excessive talents and abilities start to shine. From what I hear, it’s hard to go overboard on flattery in this day and age. Fawning on monarchs is right up there with getting a Ph.D. Piled High and Deep. When you gotta glow, you gotta glow. So glow little glow worm, glow.” Gerry cocked his head. “I’d think up some different lyrics for that, if I were you, and not call Gaston a worm by inference, but this would be the tour de force for whoever dances the part of the Scion. You know, lyrics about how, as he grew up, his qualities began to shine so much that he practically glowed when people looked at him.”
Bismarck ran a hand over his receding hairline.
“Then he goes on some kind of a quest where he meets a foreign princess who is the true love of his life. Everybody will be able to tell that she’s a perfect match for him, because the music for her dance sounds pretty much the same and uses the same chords. Three little maids who all unwary, come from a ladies’ seminary.
“Then everyone dances a few more dances, the Scion is received as king with overwhelming joy. You go back to the lullaby and as the young king and queen are crowned, with his mama dripping tears and pride in the background, you have God singing from the roof, Go, my children, with my blessing, never alone. Waking, sleeping, I am with you; you are my own.”
Gerry leaned back, exhausted from this long excursion into the field of derivative imagination. “And they go off the stage. Outdoors, you have a crew shoot fireworks off. You can’t do fireworks inside the theater. It’s too dangerous, which is a pity. Up-time, there was some night club where a couple of hundred people burned alive because it caught on fire when they shot off fireworks indoors. They’ll distract the audience’s ears from what you’re doing, though.”
“Fireworks distract eyes, too,” Marc pointed out. “All the outside gawkers will be looking up, or at least most of them.”
“Can you write this?” the duchess asked.
“Nope,” Gerry said cheerfully. “I’m a one note wonder. One note at a time on the harmonica; one finger on the piano, for that matter. Plink, plank, plunk. I’m no musician. I can’t do chords. I’m no playwright. I can’t do dialogue. But I sure can borrow ideas from bad books. You’ll have to get your people to take it and run with it.”
The conversation degenerated into cacophony.
“Montdory can take the lead. No, he can direct. No, he . . . ”
“Whatever you do, don’t touch Montfleury with a ten-foot pole. Everyone knows how strong his ties to Richelieu were.”
“Scriptwriter? Has Gaston forgiven Voiture yet?”
“DesBarreaux could do it,” Benserade said, “but by all that’s sacred, don’t put his name in the program if he agrees. Much less Sanguin. Schelandre is Calvinist, which might be an advantage, but he’s old enough that his scripts sound fusty, and in any case, he’s out of town, campaigning. With all apologies to you soldiers,” he nodded at Ruvigny and Bismarck, “wars are a nuisance as far as literature is concerned. Not for subject matter—they provide a lot of grist for the mill—but for trying to find time to write if a man is sitting in some uncomfortable tent with people likely to shoot at him any day.”
Bismarck, being without literary ambitions, laughed.
Benserade barreled on. “Mairet’s good, and he’s willing to write happy endings instead of being focused on the prestige of writing tragedies, but he’s hung up on classical unities, plus he was born in Besançon, which isn’t politically correct right now. I say get Rotrou, even if he has been writing for the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It will get his name before the new king, and right now they need all the help they can get over there if the theater is going to survive the change in regime. He writes fast. Last year he told me he’s already done more than thirty plays, and he’s not thirty years old yet. Some of those are translations or adaptations, though.”
Then there was the matter of casting, which caused another conversational jumble.
“Marguerite will be the princess, of course.”
“But who is to dance the young king?”
“Well, Cinq-Mars, since he’s Gaston’s current candidate for Marguerite’s hand. Seeing them on stage together will appease the king’s advisers.”
“If Cinq-Mars dances the prince, in the coronation scene you can even throw in a reference to the heroic death of the former king in battle, and that will apply to the marquis’ father and take everyone’s minds off what happened to Louis.”
“With you, Madame Duchesse, center stage as the proud and happy dowager in the finale.”
“I can get Soûlas to come and be an acting coach,” Ruvigny said.
“Who?”
“That theater-mad ensign who ran off to join a troupe of actors. They’d hoped to go to England last year, but didn’t make it because of the political troubles there, so he’s somewhere down in the Marais district, looking for work. Who knows? If Montdory likes him when he sees him working on this, he may get a permanent slot.”
“So you’ve taken care of the religion and politics of the playwrights. Does it make any difference if the professional actors you bring in are Catholics or Huguenots?” Bismarck asked.
“Not really.” Benserade shook his head. “The Catholic church excommunicates actors just for being actors, and the Calvinists aren’t thrilled with them either, so no one will expect them to be in good standing.”
A couple of days later, Bismarck wandered into the mews loft that Gerry had taken to calling the chop shop. “The moon will be full on the sixteenth.”
Raudegen looked up, raising an eyebrow.
“They’ve gotten to the point of setting a date for this extravaganza. That’s what they’ve decided to call it. An extravaganza. As far as I’m concerned, they can call it anything they please, but do we want moonlight for this project, or don’t we? Decide now.”
“It would give decent illumination for several days before and after. Unless it’s cloudy, of course. We could see better to drive by night if the moon was out. If we had bad luck and someone followed us, though, they could also see better. It’s a toss-up.”
“The fireworks will make a better show without moonlight,” Ruvigny said.
“Understood. Let me go tell them to pick one of the dark of the moon weeks, either before or after the middle of the month.”
One could not, of course, give a gala in honor of the king and queen unless they agreed to come. The duchess sent out feelers. Their Majesties agreed, but Gaston’s people insisted on insinuating Tristan l’Hermite, a hanger-on with literary ambitions (thus far not realized, in the sense that none of his plays had been performed) into the planning. His presence had a stultifying effect on conversation.
Except for Benserade and Cinq-Mars, who flirted madly backstage during the rehearsals.
“Oh,” Cinq-Mars said. “I adore skirts; they’re so wonderfully swishy, don’t you know, with all those petticoats. I hated it when I was taken out of my baby skirts and made to put on ‘little man’ breeches. They’re so tight and uncomfortable. At home, I’ve always snitched my sister’s clothes to lounge around in, whenever she would let me.”
* * *
Tancrède adored the harmonica.
Gerry was quite willing to share. “Just don’t lose it,” he warned.
“I won’t. Thank you so much, sir.”
Tancrède’s future did not involve a career as a musical prodigy.
He did lose the harmonica.
“Keep looking kid,” Gerry said, “but don’t worry Susanna too much if you can’t find it. I have a spare.”
On his way out, he threw a different admonition at Susanna. “If you’re the one who hid it, I don’t blame you, but I do want it back.”
She threw up her hands. “Not me.”
* * *
“I am so thankful,” Bismarck said, “for my two left feet.”
“My inability to carry a tune,” Gerry added.
They had found a comfortable refuge in the chop shop.
Within certain parameters of comfortable, of course. The hay was softer than any chair in the most luxurious rooms in any château in France, but it did tend to prickle.
“Would you mind if I asked something?”
“Nah.”
“Why don’t you object to addressing the duchesses as ‘Your Grace’? I’ve heard that the up-timers believe that all men, well, ladies too, are created equal.”
“I make myself not think of it as giving a title to a person. I’m giving the title to an office. Say, the spring we got transferred here, if our class had taken a field trip to Washington, DC, which we didn’t, and I had gotten to meet President Clinton, which I never did . . . but if I had, I wouldn’t have called him ‘Bill.’ I’d have called him ‘Mr. President’ and I should have. That’s only polite. It was a matter of the office he held. In spite of Monica Lewinsky and all.”
Bismarck enjoyed what Gerry could dredge up about Monica from his recollections. Which wasn’t much.
“Hey,” Gerry protested, “I was only a kid.”
Ruvigny enjoyed it a lot. So did both of the duchesses when he had Gerry repeat it after supper that evening as they all stood around in the back rooms, free, for once, from the busy ears of l’Hermite.
While Gerry played the raconteur, Susanna was walking around and around Marguerite, looking at her. When he had finished, she turned toward Ruvigny. “There’s no way on earth to disguise her as anything other than a noblewoman.” She sighed and curtsied to the duchess. “Much less you, Your Grace!”
“Why not?” Marguerite snipped, in full objection and protest mode.
“Because . . . ”
“Because,” Gerry interrupted. “When people say that up-timers act like nobles, they aren’t really thinking. They mean that we act different from them, and we pretty much don’t kowtow to anybody just because he thinks he’s better than we are. Or she. But we don’t act like nobles. We don’t have the mannerisms, what people call body language. We don’t act subordinate, but we don’t act entitled, either. Because we—make that most of us—don’t think we’re better than they are, either.” He cocked his head. “I’ve got to be fair. Some up-timers do, of course—think they’re better than someone else, that is. They did even back in West Virginia. There was a sizable bunch who thought they were a lot better than the hippie Stones. But you guys have the body language, and there’s no time for us to teach you how to get rid of it.”
“But,” Marguerite persisted. “How can you tell?” She glared at Susanna, who gave an exasperated sigh. “I’ve been dressing ladies of the high nobility for eight years now. Gerry’s right. I can tell, and so could anyone else who took a close look.”
“Disguise the duchesses as lesser noblewomen,” Bismarck suggested. “Someone like my mother or sisters. The lady of a country manor, somewhere out in wherever France’s equivalent of rural Brandenburg is.” He grinned. “A lady like that will think of herself as just as much entitled, in her own bit of the world, as a duchesse de Rohan is in France as a whole. But a country lady with her daughter and a small entourage won’t attract much attention”
Susanna eyed Marguerite critically. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head. “Yes, that might work.”
“I will be her bodyguard,” Raudegen said.
He intended to be the older duchess’ bodyguard. He didn’t trust her an inch. Given her well-known reluctance to leave Paris, she was being suspiciously compliant about this project, whereas Ruvigny and Bismarck were being much too gullible about her apparent change of mind. If necessary, he would physically remove the tied and gagged body of the duchess.
“You . . . ” He pointed at Marc. “You are the assistant to the steward at her manor. The rest of you . . . ” He pointed to the redheads. “You four are her staff. Upper servants—household servants. There’s enough difference in your ages. Three brothers and a sister. This family is not fabulously wealthy—Susanna will be doubling as maid for the ladies and nanny for the child. Susanna and Gerry won’t have any problems in their roles; you other two are their brothers in local militia. I’ve brought you along for extra muscle because of all the unrest. You’ve been in the armies long enough to know how ordinary soldiers act. Now, what is your name?”
Gerry grinned. “Lapierre, of course. Or Stein, since three of us are more at home in German than in French. Ruvigny’s accent in German is execrable, but maybe he can keep his mouth shut.”
“Why would a French country lady have servants named Stein?”
“Alsace. She’s heading home.”
Raudegen nodded. “That will do. She and her daughter are French-speaking upper class. The four of us are German-speaking peasants. Cavriani? Any preference?”
Marc shook his head. “Either one is fine.”
“It’s getting out of the theater that will be the trick,” Ruvigny said. We’re lucky that Cinq-Mars has that curly red hair and wears it au naturel. In that last scene, Gerry can substitute for him and get Marguerite away when they promenade out. We’ll need to use plenty of spotlights, multi-colored and strobing around the stage, to distract people’s eyes from noticing that the lead actor has changed.”
Raudegen frowned. “Who will distract Cinq-Mars from realizing that he’s not onstage at the high point?”
“Benserade, of course,” the duchess said.
“What if you end up needing more than fireworks?” Gerry asked Raudegen as they headed back to their rooms.
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
“Well, I don’t have the famous Stone Boys’ Box of Tricks with me, but I might be able to cobble some primitive stuff together. Down-time kitchens don’t offer the chemical options that up-time kitchens did, and we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves by buying any, or gunpowder, or stuff like that. If you can get them to order a few extra fireworks, though, and a couple dozen of those little earthenware storage containers . . . ” Raudegen headed into the Palais.
A couple of days later, Gerry eyed a sputtering firepot with dissatisfaction. “They’re smoke bombs that put out nauseating smells, basically, but they aren’t working as well as I hoped they would.”
“At least they seem to be reliable,” Raudegen answered. “Finish up the rest of the supply.” He walked away.
Gerry kept standing there. He wrinkled up his forehead. They need more zip. The fuses are way too slow, for one thing, he thought. Before I finish them up, I’m going to talk to Susanna and see if there’s something up in the dressmakers’ stash that would burn faster if I unraveled the fabric and twisted it into fuses.
July turned inexorably into August. The letters that Rohan sent to Paris turned just as inexorably from demanding and requiring to threatening the most dire of consequences if Something Wasn’t Done and Soon.
“We can’t hurry this,” Raudegen wrote back patiently. “Trust my professional judgment, please. This is an instance in which haste would make waste.”