The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon. Alexandre Dumas
had not made an empty threat to Bonaparte by declaring a vendetta. For at the same time he was reactivating the Companions of Jehu, to whom he had given conditional leave, and he was now sending his aide-de-camp all the way to see the Duc d’Enghien. He was tired, no doubt, of the way the Comte d’Artois and his son kept hesitating. They were the only princes with whom Cadoudal had been in contact, and though they were always promising to send him money and men and to grant him their royal protection, they had never come through. Now he was going directly to the last member of the Condé family, that warrior race, to find out if he would be willing to provide more effective aid than simply his encouragement and best wishes.
Once his devices were set, Fouché would wait patiently, like a spider at the edge of its web.
That day, in both Vernon and Les Andelys, near the highway from Paris to Rouen, the gendarmerie received the order to keep their horses saddled day and night.
MONSIEUR LE DUC D’ENGHIEN LIVED in the little Ettenheim chateau, on the right bank of the Rhine about twenty kilometers from Strasbourg in the Grand-Duchy of Baden. He was the grandson of the Prince de Condé, who was himself the son of the one-eyed Prince de Condé who cost France so dearly during the regency of Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans. Just one Condé, and he died young, separated the one-eyed duke from the Condé whose victories at Thionville and in the Battle of Nördlingen won him the name The Great Condé. His great greed, rotten morals, and cold cruelty proved him indeed to be the son of his father, Henri II de Bourbon. Condé’s strong desire to occupy the French throne prompted him to disclose that Anne d’Autriche’s two sons, Louis XIV and the Duc d’Orléans, were not in fact the sons of Louis XIII, which could easily have been true.
It was with Henri II de Bourbon that the celebrated Condé family changed character. No longer generous, it became greedy; no longer gay, it became melancholic. Although history states that he was the son of Henri I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, chronicles from that time protest against the filiation and assign him a quite different father. Apparently Henri I’s wife, the duchess Charlotte de la Trémouille, had been living in adultery with a Gascon page when suddenly, after a four-month absence, her husband returned home with no warning. The duchess quickly made a grim decision; after all, an adulterous woman is already halfway down the road to a murder. She afforded her husband a royal welcome. Although it was wintertime, she managed to find some lovely fruits, and with him she shared the most beautiful pear in the basket. The knife she used to cut the pear had a golden blade, and one side of it had been bathed with poison. The prince died that very night.
Charles de Bourbon reported the news of the death to Henri IV, and attributed the cause to papal decree: “His death was caused by Pope Sixtus V’s excommunication,” he said. “Yes,” Henri IV replied, never one to pass up an opportunity to be witty, “the excommunication didn’t hurt, but something else lent a hand.”
An investigation was opened, and serious charges were leveled against Charlotte de Trémouille. Henri IV asked that all the trial documents be delivered to him, and then threw every bit of them into the fire. When he was asked the reasons for his unusual action, he replied simply, “It is better for a bastard to inherit the Condé name than for such a great name to disappear forever.”
So a bastard did inherit the Condé name, and he brought into that parasitic branch of the once noble family vices that had rather go unnamed. Rebellion, certainly, was the least of them.
Our position is different from that of other novelists. If we fail to report such details, we are accused of not knowing history any better than some historians. And if we do reveal them, then we are accused of trying to sully the reputation of the royal families.
But let us hasten to add that the young prince Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon had none of the failings of his father, Henri II de Bourbon, who, had he not been imprisoned for three years, would never have come back to his wife, though she was the most beautiful creature of the time. And none of the failings of the Great Condé, whose amorous relationship with Madame de Longueville, his sister, were the talk of Paris during the Fronde; or of Louis de Condé, who, while he was regent of France, simply emptied the state’s coffers into his own and those of Madame de Prie.
No, the young prince Louis-Antoine was a fine-looking young man of thirty-three years. He had emigrated with his father and the Comte d’Artois, and in ’92 he had joined the corps of émigrés that had gathered along the Rhine. For eight years he had been at war against France, it is true, but he fought in order to combat principles that his princely education and royal bias forbade him to support. When Condé’s army was disbanded, as it was after the Lunéville peace treaty, the Duc d’Enghien could have moved to England, as had his father, his grandfather, other princes, and most of the émigrés. But because of a love affair no one knew about then, although it has become common knowledge since, he chose to set up residence, as we have said, in Ettenheim.
There he lived like an ordinary citizen. The immense Condé fortune, which had been built with gifts from Henri IV, the possessions of the Duc de Montmorency (who was decapitated), and the plunders of Louis le Borgne, had all been confiscated by the Revolution. The émigrés living around Offenburg often came to pay their respects. Sometimes the young men would organize large hunting parties in the Black Forest. At other times the prince would disappear for six or eight days, then reappear suddenly, without anyone knowing where he had been. His absences elicited all sorts of conjectures, and with neither confirmation nor denial, he simply let people think and say whatever they wanted to, no matter how strange their speculations and no matter the cost to his reputation.
One morning, a stranger came to Ettenheim. He had crossed the Rhine at Kehl, then followed the Offenburg road, and finally presented himself at the prince’s door. The prince had been gone for three days.
The stranger waited. On the fifth day, the prince returned home. The stranger told the prince his name and the name of the man who had sent him. He asked that he be received at such time that the prince found it to be convenient. The prince invited the stranger in straightaway.
Sol de Grisolles was the stranger’s name.
“You have been sent by the good Cadoudal?” the prince asked. “I just read in an English newspaper that he had left London and returned to France to avenge an insult made to his honor, and that once the insult had been avenged, he had gone back to London.”
Cadoudal’s aide-de-camp recounted the adventure as it had happened, without omitting a single detail. He told the prince, too, that he’d been sent to the First Consul to declare the vendetta. Then he spoke of his mission to Laurent, whom he had ordered, in Cadoudal’s name, to call the Companions of Jehu back to the work they had been doing before Cadoudal had relieved them of their duties.
“Have you nothing more to tell me?” the young prince asked.
“Yes, I do, Prince,” said the messenger. “I need to tell you that in spite of the Lunéville peace agreement, war will break out with renewed ferocity against the First Consul. Pichegru has finally come to an understanding with your father, and he will join in the cause with all the hate that’s been kindled by his exile in Sinnary. Moreau is furious at how little recognition his victory at Hohenlinden has received, and he is tired of seeing the Rhine army and its generals sacrificed for the troops in Italy. So he too is ready to place his forces and his immense popularity behind a rebellion. And there is more. There is something almost nobody knows anything about, and I am to reveal it to you, Prince.”
“What is that?”
“Within the army a secret society is being established.”
“The Philadelphian Society.”
“Are you familiar with it?”
“I have heard about it.”
“Does Your Highness know who its leader is?”
“Colonel