“Two families, very different, forged into one.”
“Ah. One dwelling in the countryside of the north, I’m guessing,” said Bart, nodding at the first landscape.
“De Crepy. Petty nobles. Not especially distinguished, but middling affluent, and fecund.”
“The other family must have been Alp-dwellers, then,” said Bart, turning to regard the gloomier and more horrid of the two landscapes.
“De Gex. A poor dwindling clan. Die-hard Catholics living in a place, not far from Geneva, that had become dominated by Huguenots.”
“So the two families were quite different! How did they come to be joined?”
“The family de Crepy were tied, first by proximity, then by fealty, and at last by marriage, to the Counts of Guise,” said Rossignol.
“Err…I am vaguely aware that those Guises were important, and got into some sort of trouble with the Bourbons, but if you could refresh my memory, monsieur…”
“It would be my pleasure, Lieutenant. A century and a half ago, a comte de Guise distinguished himself so well in battle that the King created him duc de Guise. Of his aides, squires, lackeys, mistresses, captains, and hangers-on, several were of the de Crepy line. Some of these developed a taste for adventure, and began to conceive ambitions beyond the parochial. They lashed themselves to the mast, as it were, of the House of Guise, which seemed like a good idea, and served them well. Until, that is, a hundred and one years ago, when the two leading men of that House-Henry, duc de Guise, and Louis, cardinal de Guise-were assassinated by the King or his supporters. For they had waxed more powerful than the King himself.”
There was a pause now to look at some rather sanguinary art-work.
“How could such a thing happen, monsieur? How could this rival House become so powerful?”
“Nowadays, when le Roi is so strong, it is difficult for us to conceive of, is it not? It may help you to know that much of the power that so appalled the King was rooted in a thing called the Holy Catholic League. It had its beginnings in towns and cities all over France, where local priests and gentlemen had, in the wake of the Reformation, found themselves engulfed in Huguenots, and so banded together to defend their faith from that heresy and to oppose its spread.”
“Ah, here is where the de Gex family enters the picture, no?”
“I am almost to that part of the story. You are correct that the de Gexes were typical of the sorts of men who in those days founded local chapters of the Holy Catholic League. The House of Guise had forged these scattered groups into a national movement. After the assassinations of Henry and Louis de Guise, the decapitated League rose up in revolt against the King-who was himself assassinated not long after-and there was chaos throughout the country for a number of years. The new Huguenot King, Henry IV, converted to Catholicism and re-established control, generally at the expense of the ultra-Catholics and to the benefit of the Huguenots. Or so it seemed to many fervent Catholics, including the one who assassinated him in 1610. Now, during this time the fortunes of the de Crepy family went into eclipse. Some were killed, some went back to their ancestral lands in northern France and melted back into bourgeois obscurity, some scattered abroad. But a few of them ended up far from home, in that part of France that borders on Lake Geneva. It was the best, or the worst, place for Catholic warriors to be at the time. They were directly across the lake from Geneva, which to them was like an ant’s nest from which Huguenots continually streamed out to preach and convert in every parish in France. Accordingly, the Catholics in that area were more ardent than anywhere else-the first to create local branches of the Holy Catholic League, the first to swear fealty to the House of Guise, and, after the assassinations, the most warlike. They had not assassinated Henry IV, but only because they could not find him. The leading nobleman of that district-one Louis, sieur de Gex-had gathered around him a small, ragged, but ferocious coterie of like-minded sorts who had been driven out of other pays, and gravitated to this remote outpost from all over France as the fortunes of their party had declined.”
“Among them, I’m quite sure, must have been several of the de Crepy clan.”
“Indeed. So your question of how they got from here, to there,” said Rossignol, indicating the two landscapes, “is answered. The newcomers were fertile and affluent where the family de Gex were dwindling and poor.”
“I suppose most of the people in their district who knew how to make money had become Huguenots,” mused Bart.
This drew from Rossignol a sharp look, and a reprimand. “Lieutenant Bart. I believe I understand, now, why Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur sees a need to instruct you in how to be politic.”
Bart shrugged. “It is true, monsieur. All the best merchants of Dunkerque were Huguenots, and after 1685-”
“It is precisely because it is true, that you must not come out and state it,” said Rossignol.
“Very well then, monsieur, I vow not to say anything true for the remainder of this conversation. Pray continue!”
After a moment to collect himself, Rossignol stepped over to a stack of portraits leaning against a wall, and began to paw through them: men, women, children, and families, dressed in the fashions of three generations ago. “When the Wars of Religion finally came to an end, both families, having nothing else to do, began to produce children. A generation later, these began to marry each other. Here I may get some of the details wrong, but if memory serves, this is how it went: the scion of the de Gex line, Francis, married one Marguerite Diane de Crepy around 1640 and they had several children one after the other, then none for twelve years, then a surprise pregnancy. This ended in the death of Marguerite only a few hours following the birth of a boy, Edouard. The father construed the former as a sacrifice to, the latter as a gift from, the Almighty; and considering himself too old to raise a boy by himself, gave him to a Jesuit school in Lyon where he was found to be a sort of child prodigy. He joined the Society of Jesus at an exceptionally young age. He is now Confessor to de Maintenon herself.”
Rossignol had found a portrait of a lean young man, dressed in a Jesuit’s robes, glaring out of the canvas in a way that suggested he could actually see Rossignol and Bart standing in this back-hallway, and did not approve much of either one of them.
“I have heard of him,” said Bart, and edged out of the portrait’s sight-line.
Rossignol found an older portrait of a plump woman in a blue dress. “The sister of Francis de Gex was named Louise Anne. She married one Alexandre Louis de Crepy. They had two boys, who died at the same time from smallpox, and two girls, who survived it.” He pulled out of the stack a gouache of two post-pubescent girls: one older, bigger, more beautiful than the other, who peered over her shoulder, as if hiding behind her. “The older of the girls, Anne-Marie, who was unscarred by the disease, married the comte d’Oyonnax, who was much older. Anne-Marie was his second or third wife. This fellow Oyonnax had originally been a petty noble, but even that modest rank had stretched his wits and his wealth thin. His ancestral lands lay just at the doorstep of the Franche-Comte.”
“Even I have heard of that!”
“Really, Lieutenant? I am surprised, for it is landlocked.”
Rossignol’s jest almost went by Bart, for Rossignol was not, by and large, a fount of clever bon mots. But Bart caught it after a few awkward moments, and acknowledged it with a smile and a nod. “It is a part of the world over which the Kings of France have been fighting with the Hapsburgs for a long time, is it not-like two enemies trapped in a longboat together and struggling for the possession of the one dagger.”
“The analogy, though nautical, is apt,” said Rossignol. “During the reign of Louis XIII-whom it was my father’s great honor to serve as Royal cryptanalyst-Oyonnax had allowed the King’s armies to use his land as a base for invading the Franche-Comte, which they did frequently. In exchange for which he had been elevated to a Count. Such was his rank when he married the young Anne-Marie de Crepy. A few years after, he performed a like service for the legions of Louis XIV, which, since it led to the annexation of the whole of the Franche-Comte to France, caused the King to elevate him to a Duke. He and the new Duchess moved to Versailles, where he got to enjoy his new status for only a few months before she poisoned him.”