Paris: The Novel

friends and neighbors, they discreetly vanished. A month later, they arrived in London, where the existing Huguenot community soon grew to many times its size.

    A week after the Edict of Fontainebleau, Perceval d’Artagnan called Amélie to him for a talk.
    “My child,” he announced, “I have good news for you. A great opportunity has arisen—one that may change your life entirely.” Madame de Saint-Loubert, a distant kinswoman of the family, well connected at court, had recently written to him, he explained, to let him know of a position that might be of interest. He had written back. “And now it’s all arranged.” He smiled. “You’re to go to Versailles.”
    “To Versailles, Papa?” Amélie looked astonished. “I thought you hated the court.”
    She was right, of course. During the last twenty years, d’Artagnan had watched the Sun King’s grip on France get tighter and tighter. If Cardinal Richelieu had been the mentor of Cardinal Mazarin, Mazarin in turn had left the king with a trained successor, the superintendent of finances, Colbert. For twenty years Colbert had built up a bureaucracy of plain men who quietly took more and more of the administration of France into their hands.
    As long as the court remained in Paris, the process hadn’t been toonoticeable. The king had made improvements to the Louvre, and started building the splendid hospital of Les Invalides for army veterans. That was welcome. Social life had continued as usual. The aristocrats had their mansions. Corneille, Molière and Racine had filled the theaters. And if bureaucrats increasingly attended to the tiresome business of running the government, the aristocrats still provided the army officers. Theirs was the honor of battle. They could fight and die for their king, in the old-fashioned way, pride themselves on their valor, win glory like the heroes of feudal times and look down upon the bureaucrats and merchant classes alike.
    Until the court moved to Versailles. It had happened only three years ago, but the transformation had been complete. Anyone who wanted office and preferment now had to abandon Paris and live under the king’s supervision there. Even valiant soldiers, having campaigned in the summer—for war, thank God, was still an affair of gentlemen, to be conducted in the summer season—still needed to spend the winter in lodgings in Versailles so that they could catch the eye of the king and get a command the following year. And they had to hang about there all the time. They could visit their estates when necessary, but if they slipped off to Paris for a week without permission, the king would notice and their chance of a command would be gone. D’Artagnan disliked the king and his methods, but he could see his cunning. Louis now had everyone under his thumb.
    “It’s true that I don’t like Versailles,” he confessed to Amélie, “and I don’t want to go there myself. But it’s still a wonderful opportunity for you. The position that’s on offer is beyond anything we might have hoped for. You’ll be one of the maids of honor to the dauphine, the daughter-in-law of the king himself.” He smiled kindly. “And I think the change of scene will do you good.”
    The matter was decided in any case. Three days later, Amélie found herself on her way to the court at Versailles.

    As Roland de Cygne looked at the letter, he knew that he must answer it. But he didn’t want to.
    It was some months since he had communicated the sad news of his wife’s death to his cousin Guy in Canada. It was the first time he’d written to him in years.
    In the early part of the century, his grandfather had correspondedwith his brother Alain regularly. They were devoted to each other, and the three thousand miles of ocean that lay between them could not alter that. For a long time Robert had hoped that his younger brother would cover himself in glory in Canada, achieve a great position and the wealth that came with it and return to France to found a second branch of the family. This dream perhaps never died until the day that Robert himself departed.
    But things hadn’t worked out that way. Not that Alain had done badly. He’d received some quite substantial land grants. But they required his attention if they were going to be worth anything. In due course he’d asked his brother to find him a wife of noble family, but who would not mind sharing the hardships of the frontier. That had not been easy. It had been