Free The Cat and the King by Louis Auchincloss Page A

and the great Mademoiselle herself, the king’s cousin. I thrilled at my uncle’s description of the latter, striding in scarlet equestrian habit along the parapets of the Bastille and giving the signal with her raised riding crop for the cannon to open fire on the royal troops. Corneille, I was sure, had found in these Amazons the models for his great pagan queens: Sophonisbe, Viriate, Pulchérie.
    My trouble was that I came to see war, subjectively, as a kind of test of the manhood of François de Bourbon-Conti. There can be tremendous egotism in an awed and bashful boy. Mighty, menacing, glorious as these figures of my uncle’s tales seemed to me, I had nonetheless a fantasy in which they existed principally as a challenge to myself. I never made the smallest connection between warfare and any benefit to a conquering, or detriment to a conquered, people. No, it existed simply to prove who were men and who were not. It was the sport of gods. It was glory, and without glory, life was a thing of baubles and ribbons, of bows and curtsies. Without glory, life was Versailles.
    It was inevitable that I should choose an army career, and I shall never forget the terrified anxiety that attended my first campaign. I was literally sick with fear that I should prove a disappointment to my uncle. He was no longer, of course, on active duty. He was old, and, as it later turned out, already dying, but I knew that he had officers who would tell him of my every move, and that he looked to me to carry on the glory of his name. I was not, certainly, a good officer in that first action. Nobody can be a good officer who is more obsessed with looking brave than with defeating the enemy. But my responsibilities were fortunately few, and it did not affect the tide of battle that I was so intent on exposing myself to danger. Happily, I was noticed, not for exposure but for courage; the dispatches mentioned me, and my uncle had some slight reason to be satisfied before he closed his eyes for the last time. Another example of the grossness of my egotism was that I cared more to learn that he had died informed of my gallantry than that he had died! And yet I suppose I loved the grizzled old war horse as much as, until then, I had loved a human being.
    I offer this background because it is necessary if you are to understand what happened to me when, after five years of vigorous campaigns, the king summarily removed me from the front and stationed me at Versailles. I was given no place in his council, no function in his court. My wife and I had little relationship. I had not been her choice, any more than she had been mine. She was, of course, the Great Condé’s granddaughter, but even this was not a bond, for she, like most of her family, had hated him. What was I to do with my life at Versailles? I turned to cards, to women, to wine—to too much of all of them—and then, in my extremity—to the other thing. I suppose, as I had always associated court life with the effeminate, the unmanly, there was a kind of crazy logic in my crowning my activities with what I deemed the most unmanly conduct of all. It was a species of suicide.
    My experiments in the “Italian” vice, however, never had the effect of weaning me from the other sex, and it was during my brief affair with Madame de Creon that I incurred the hostility of my wife’s sister-in-law, the duchesse de Bourbon. The latter and I had at first respected each other’s wit and taste; there had even been a time, shortly after we had both been married off to grandchildren of the Great Condé, when we had seemed to eye each other with the prospect of a still closer relationship. I had been attracted from the beginning to that diminutive vision of pale skin and raven hair and those sparkling dark eyes. But Madame la Duchesse’s wit, which had been my delight on leaves from the army, began to seem too corrosive when I was forced into a life of