Free The Cat and the King by Louis Auchincloss

rode on in a silence that with any other companion would have been awkward. As it was, I felt a curious elevation of spirits. Then Conti’s mood seemed suddenly to alter again. His voice, when he spoke, was grating as I had never heard it. “Do you know something, Saint-Simon? Things would have been different had I been given a command. But what in the name of Christ is a man to do when he’s married off to a dwarf of a cousin and kept dancing his heels on parquet floors?”
    Conti now proceeded to relate to me, as we walked our horses slowly across country, the story of his affair with the duchesse de Bourbon. It took the rest of our ride, and he had to finish it in his suite at Meudon over a bottle of wine. I have tried to put together his account as I remember it, but no doubt some of my own style will have crept in. Everything about Conti was beautiful, so my impression of the whole may have embellished the parts to something more than they were as spoken.

11
    I THINK you know, Saint-Simon, that I was a special favorite of my father’s older brother, the prince de Condé, known as the ‘Great Condé.’ My uncle’s own children were small in stature and inept at sport, and he set great store by these things. Also, poor creatures, they were sadly plain, and he admired good looks, even such slight ones as your humble friend may be blessed—or cursed—with. I was immensely proud of the hero’s esteem, but I paid a heavy price for it, first in the bitter resentment and jealousy of my cousins, and second (and more important) in the intense anxiety that it generated in me as to whether I could ever turn into a soldier remotely worthy of such inflated admiration.
    I made long visits as a youth to Chantilly and rode and shot with my uncle and spent the evenings by the fire listening to him discourse on his campaigns in the Lowlands, in Spain, and in our poor divided France of Fronde days, when he was in arms against his own sovereign. Of course, it was not the boy king that he had hated but my mother’s uncle, the wily Mazarin, and it spoke worlds for Condé’s devotion to myself that he was able to overlook my relationship to his villain. Still another reason that I should have to prove my manliness in his eyes! I learned about all his battles, all his campaigns; I studied each maneuver and tactic; I could identify every officer in the huge dusky battle canvases that filled the great hall. I remember that my mother, who had some of the Mazarin nose for detrimental anecdote, used to say that it was a regrettable touch of vanity in an otherwise great man to have included in his military gallery pictures of his defeats of the troops of his own nation. It amused her that these were signalized by the addition of the muse of history in the upper-left-hand corner veiling her eyes from the scene! But I found Mother simply irreverent. The Great Condé was to me without fault.
    It has become fashionable to look back upon the age of the Fronde as one when the great nobles petulantly and childishly sacrificed the peace of the realm to their own personal bickering. We have come to see it as a time when civil war was looked upon as a kind of sport for the upper classes, when pitched battles took the place of the boar hunt, and the siege of citadels that of the chess game. All this, allegedly at the expense of the starved poor, is now contrasted unfavorably to the order and stability of our own era, when the quarrelsome peers and princes have been safely domesticated at Versailles. But I impenitently mourn those more vivid days.
    Anyone, surely, would have to admit their sharper color, their acuter flavor. I never tired of hearing not only of the warriors—of Beaufort, Turenne, Villeroi, and my own father—but of the great ladies so close to the battles, sometimes actually commanding on besieged ramparts—my gallant aunt de Longueville, the intrepid duchesse de Chevreuse,