The blade had been made for her especially, forged in Toledo from the best steel. She unsheathed it to admire its perfect straightness, its beautiful shine, its suppleness and keen edge. She sketched a few feints, parries, and ripostes. Finally, with her thumb, she made a spike as long as her hand spring from the pommel, fine and sharp-edged like a Florentine dagger, which she admired with an almost loving gleam in her eye.
3
On its completion, the Palais-Cardinal would comprise a splendid main building, with two long wings, two courtyards, and an immense garden which stretched between rue de Richelieu and rue des Bons-Enfants. But in 1633, it was still little more than the original Hotel d'Angennes, acquired nine years earlier, although its new, illustrious owner, determined to have a residence in Paris appropriate to his station, was busy having it enlarged and embellished. He was so determined, in fact, that when he was put in charge of the city's new fortifications he seized the opportunity to extend his domain into the vast area which the old ramparts had occupied, rebuilding the walls further to the west from the Saint-Denis gate to the new gate of La Conference. The capital gained as much as the cardinal from this enlargement: new streets were laid out and new districts were born where only wasteland and ditches had existed before, including the creation of a renowned horse market and the beginnings of the neighbourhoods of Mont-martre and Saint-Honore. But Richelieu was condemned to live with the builders a while longer in the Hotel d'Angennes. The imposing fagade of his palace, on rue de Saint-Honore, would still take years to complete.
Thus it was that, at eight o'clock in the morning, Ensign Arnaud de Laincourt entered the Palais-Cardinal by passing beneath a large scaffold which was already loaded with workmen. The musketeers who had just opened the wrought-iron gates recognised him and gave him a military salute to which he responded before entering the guard room. This area, with its one hundred and eighty square metres of floor space and its monumental chimney, was where ordinary visitors waited to be summoned. There were already a score of them in attendance, but above all the room was crawling with men in red capes, as it was here that guards who had ensured the safety of His Eminence all night were relieved by those who, like Laincourt, had arrived to take their shift. Rows of muskets—loaded and ready to fire—were arranged on the racks. The light fell from high south-facing windows and conversations blended into a hubbub which echoed beneath the wainscoting.
Slender and athletic, Arnaud de Laincourt was approaching thirty. He had dark eyebrows, crystalline blue eyes, a straight nose, smoothly shaven cheeks, and pale skin. His line features had a strange charm, youthful yet
wise. It was easier to imagine him studying philosophy at the Sorbonne than wearing the uniform of the cardinal's horse guards. Nevertheless, he carried the plumed felt hat and the white gloves, and wore the cape blazoned with a cross, along with the sword hanging from the regulation leather baldric which crossed his chest from his left shoulder. Moreover, as an ensign he was an officer—a junior officer according to the military hierarchy then in force, but an officer nonetheless, and one who was promised a lieutenancy, so highly did Richelieu regard him.
He was saluted again and, as was his habit, he courteously returned the salute with a personal reserve which discouraged idle chatter. Then he took one of the small books known as sextodecimos from his russet red leather doublet and, intending to read, went to lean against a pillar close to two guards sitting by a pedestal table. The youngest, Neuvelle, was only just twenty-six and had not been with the guards for more than a few weeks. His companion, on the other hand, was turning grey. He was called Brussand, was a good forty years of age, and had served with the Cardinal's Guards since the formation of the company seven years earlier.
"Still," said Neuvelle in a lowered voice, "I would love to know who the man His Eminence received in such secrecy last night was. And why."
When Brussand, leaning on the card table, did not react, the young man insisted: "Think about the fact that he did not pass through the antechambers. The musketeers who guard the little gate were ordered to do nothing but announce his arrival, and not ask questions. All the other guards were kept away. And it was Captain Saint-Georges in person who escorted him to the cardinal's apartments and accompanied him back!"
"Our orders," Brussand finally replied, without raising his eyes from his game of patience, "were to be deaf and blind to all that concerned this gentleman. You should not have watched the doors."
Neuvelle shrugged.