“You got hold of him!—your men came up!” cried La Regnie, with flashing eyes, grasping Desgrais by the arm as if he were the fleeing murderer himself.
“Fifteen paces ahead of me,” said Desgrais, in a hollow voice, and drawing his breath hard, “this fellow, before my eyes, dodged to one side, and vanished through the wall.”
“Vanished!—through the wall! Are you out of your senses?” La Regnie cried, taking three steps backwards, and striking his hands together.
“Call me as great a madman as you please, Monsieur,” said Desgrais, rubbing his forehead like one tortured by evil thoughts. “Call me a madman, or a fool that sees spooks; but what I have told you is the literal truth. I stood staring at the wall, while several of my men came up out of breath, and with them the Marquis de la Fare (who had picked himself up), with his drawn sword in his hand. We lighted torches, we examined the wall all over. There was not the trace of a door, a window, any opening. It is the strong stone wall of a courtyard, belonging to a house in which people are living—against whom there is not the slightest suspicion. I have looked into the whole thing again this morning in broad daylight. It must be the very devil himself who is at work befooling us in the matter.”
This story got bruited abroad through Paris, where all heads were full of the sorceries, callings up of spirits and pacts with the devil indulged in by La Voisin, Le Vigoureux, and the wicked priest Le Sage; and as it lies in our eternal nature that the bent towards the supernatural and the marvellous overpasses all reason, people soon positively believed what Desgrais had only said in his impatience—that the very devil himself must protect the rascals, and that they had sold their souls to him. We can readily understand that Desgrais’ story soon received many absurd embellishments. It was printed, and hawked about the town, with a woodcut at the top representing a horrible figure of the devil sinking into the ground before the terrified Desgrais. Quite enough to frighten the people, and so terrify Desgrais’ men that they lost all courage, and went about the streets behung with amulets, and sprinkled with holy water.
Seeing that the Chambre Ardente was unsuccessful, Argenson applied to the King to constitute—with special reference to this novel description of crime a tribunal armed with greater powers for tracking and punishing offenders. The King, thinking he had already given too ample powers to the Chambre Ardente, and shocked at the horrors of the numberless executions carried out by the bloodthirsty La Regnie, refused.
Then another method of influencing His Majesty was devised.
In the apartments of Madame de Maintenon—where the King was in the habit of spending much of his time in the afternoons—and also, very often, would be at work with his Ministers till late at night—a poetical petition was laid before him, on the part of the “Endangered Lovers,” who complained that when “galanterie” rendered it incumbent on them to be the bearers of some valuable present to the ladies of their hearts, they had always to do it at the risk of their lives. They said that, of course, it was honour and delight to pour out their blood for the lady of their heart in knightly encounter, but that the treacherous attack of the assassin, against which it was impossible to guard, was quite a different matter. They expressed their hope that Louis, the bright pole-star of love and gallantry, might deign—arising end staining in fullest splendour—to dispel the darkness of night, and thus reveal the black mysteries hidden thereby; that the God-like hero, who had hurled his foes to the dust, would now once more wave his flashing falchion and, as did Hercules in the case of the Laernean Hydra, and Theseus in that of the Minotaur, vanquish the threatening monster who was consuming all the delights of love, and darkening all joy into deep sorrow and inconsolable mourning.
Serious as the subject was, this poem was not deficient in most wittily-turned phrases, particularly where it described the state of watchful anxiety in which lovers had to glide to their mistresses, and how this mental strain necessarily destroyed all the delights of love, and nipped all adventures of “galanterie” in the very bud. And, as it wound up with a high-flown panegyric of Louis XIV, the King could not but read it with visible satisfaction. When he had perused it, he turned to Madame de Maintenon—without taking his eyes from it—read it again—aloud this time—and then asked, with a pleased smile, what she thought of the petition of the “Endangered Lovers.”