Виктория Холт - Louis the Well-Beloved

The Marquise was suddenly frightened, not for her safety that night – and she knew that the people hated her beyond anyone else in the Kingdom – but because it was the construction of Bellevue which had infuriated them, and Bellevue was her creation. So if anything happened tonight she would be blamed.

Nothing must happen.

Louis had come because he had promised. But there must be no regrets in their relationship. Everything that she brought to him must be desirable in his eyes. She must never plunge him into unpleasantness. Unpleasant! The mob could be dangerous. And who knew, in the horror of an attack on Bellevue, they might forget that Louis was their well-beloved King.

She turned to Louis. ‘I am afraid for your safety,’ she said, ‘so I am going to cancel everything I have arranged. I pray you put no obstacle in my way. If you should suffer the slightest pain tonight through the disaffection of these wild people of Paris, I should never forgive myself.’

Louis pressed her hand. He was grieved to see her so upset. Moreover he was extremely anxious to avoid an unpleasant scene.

‘You must do as you wish, my dear,’ he said.

She gave the order.

‘We are leaving the château,’ she told her guests. ‘We shall take supper in a cottage which is at the end of the gardens. All lights will be extinguished in the château so the mob will realise that no one is there. Now . . . there is no time to lose.’

Thus it was that the grand entertainment at Bellevue was cancelled; there was no play, no fireworks, no ball.

The guests crowded into the little house, where a picnic supper was served instead of the grand banquet, with guests sitting on the floor and crowding every room.

The King was charming as he always was during these more intimate parties and did not seem to mind in the least that the grand affair at the château had been cancelled.

Here again, said the Court, this showed his deep regard for the Marquise. They seemed as happy together in the modest cottage as they did in the state apartments of Versailles.

Meanwhile the angry mob had marched to the château only to find it in darkness.

They had been misled, they grumbled. There was no banquet tonight. They would not have the pleasure of storming the place and helping themselves to the food which had been prepared for the noble guests.

Many of them were wishing they had not made the journey from Paris. They were not yet ready to hate the King. For the moment they still saw him as a young man misled by favourites, extravagant because he had never been taught to be otherwise. The legend of the well-beloved took a long time to die.

So while the intimate supper party went on in the little house in the grounds, the people straggled back to Paris, as disgruntled with the leaders of the march as they were with the châtelaine of Bellevue.

* * *

Discontent rumbled throughout the capital, and one summer’s day serious riots broke out.

The child of a working woman, who lived in the Faubourg St Antoine, went out into the streets to buy bread for his mother and he never returned.

The frantic mother ran into the streets, searching for him, and when he was not to be found she continued to run through the streets calling out her misfortune, tearing at her hair and her clothes, and shouting that her child had been kidnapped.

The people gathered. What was this story of a missing boy? Taxes. Starvation. And now were their children to be taken from them!

The Comte d’Argenson had put forward a plan to clean up the city and remove the many beggars and vagabonds who infested it. These people were homeless and destitute and, as colonists were needed in the Empire, it was decided that they should be shipped either to Louisiana or to Canada to work on the silkworm farms which French colonists were setting up there.

The beggars grumbled. There was no liberty in France any longer, they declared; but as the people were glad to see their city rid of these wandering beggars, no significant protest was made.

It was a different matter when a child belonging to a decent woman was stolen.

The people gathered about the stricken mother offering sympathy, some declaring that they had heard stories of missing children – little boys and girls who were sent out to shop for their parents and never returned.

Rumour grew and the stories became fantastic.

‘The police kidnap the children and then ask payment for them. There was a woman in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel who was forced to work for weeks in order to pay the ransom demanded for her child!’

‘They are taking our children to ship them to the Colonies.’

‘They are robbing the people, not only of their food, but of their children!’

Wilder grew the rumours, and the wildest of all was born in the St Antoine district and quickly swept through Paris.

‘Ship them to the colonies? Not they! There is a person . . . let us not mention the name. A very highly placed person. He – or she, shall we say – suffers from a dreadful disease, and it is only possible to preserve life by bathing in the blood of children.’

So that was what was happening to their children! They were being slaughtered that some highly placed person of the Court might take daily baths in their blood!

‘A hundred children are missing,’ they said in the cafés.

‘A thousand children have been stolen!’ was the cry in Les Halles.

‘People of Paris, guard your children,’ was the admonition of the agitators on the street corners. ‘Those selfish monsters who have priced our grain so high that we cannot afford our bread, those who demand the vingtième, now ask for the blood of your children.’

* * *

The mob was on the march.

Several gendarmes were killed in the streets when the crowd fell upon them with clubs because someone had said they had seen them talking to children. One policeman ran for shelter into a house in the Rue de Clichy, and in a very short time that house was wrecked. In the Croix-Rouge a restaurant keeper had been said to be on very friendly terms with the police who often drank wine in his shop. His restaurant was mobbed and destroyed.

It was necessary to call in the Guards and musketeers to restore order. Proclamations were read in the streets. There had never been orders to arrest children. If the police were guilty of kidnapping children, such cases would be investigated if the parents would come forward and make their accusations. Any who had suffered would receive compensation.

Those who had led the revolt were arrested, tried, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to public hanging in the Place de Grève.

* * *

Louis rode into his capital. The people watched him sullenly.

In the Place de Greve were the rotting bodies of those who had led the revolt; they were not the only guilty ones. There were thousands in Paris who had marched through the streets, who had destroyed the houses, who were responsible for the murders and who poured insults on the name of the King and his mistress.

They saw him differently now. He was not their innocent Louis. He was to blame. He squandered money on fine buildings and his mistress, while they were starving.

No one shouted Long live Louis, Louis le Bien-aimé.

They received him in silence which was broken only by one voice, which cried ‘Herod!’

Several others took up the cry. They were determined to believe the worst of him. It was a ridiculous story that he should have had children kidnapped so that he, or his mistress, might bathe in their blood. But such was the mood of the people that they were ready to accept this even while he rode among them.

Louis gave no sign that he noticed their indifference. His dignity remained unimpaired. He looked neither to right nor left.

Thus for the first time the King rode unacclaimed through his city of Paris.

Had he been more in tune with his people, had he attempted to explain – even then they would have listened to him.

They were still prepared to say: he is young even yet. Let him dismiss his mistress, let him spend his time governing the people, finding means to alleviate their suffering instead of frittering away time and money on building fine palaces. They were still prepared to make up their differences, to take him back after this coolness, this little quarrel between them and their beloved King. Would he but make the right gesture, would he but assure them that he was ready to be their King, they in their turn would be ready to welcome him back to their esteem, to believe in him, to accept his rule, to continue to serve the Monarchy.

It was for him to say. Two roads stretched out clearly before him. If he followed the one his people asked him to, very soon in the streets they would be shouting again: Long live Louis, Louis the well-beloved.

* * *

Louis returned to Versailles.

He was hurt by his reception. ‘Herod’, they had called him, those sullen, glowering people.

He told the Marquise of his reception.

‘I shall never again show myself to the people of Paris, never again shall I go to Paris for pleasure. I will only enter that city when state ceremonies demand it.’

‘It will soon be necessary to go through Paris on our way to Compiègne,’ she reminded him.

‘There should be a road from Versailles to Compiègne which skirts Paris.’ Louis paused. ‘There shall be such a road,’ he added.

The King and the Marquise smiled at each other. The prospect of building was always so attractive to them both.

‘A road to Compiègne,’ cried the King. ‘It shall be made immediately.’

And when the new road was made it was lightly referred to by the people of Paris as La Route de la Révolte.

Louis had chosen. Never again would the streets of Paris echo with the cry of ‘Louis the Well-Beloved’.

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