5 the fourth son of Henri II and Catherine de Médici; it was his death in 1584 that lead Henri III to name Henri de Navarre his heir.
The Red and the Black
catastrophe, is that Queen Marguerite de Navarre, hidden in a house on Place de Grève, dared to ask the executioner for her lover's head. And the next night, at midnight, she took the head in her carriage, and she herself buried it in a chapel at the foot of Montmartre Hill." "Really?" exclaimed Julien, moved. "Mademoiselle de La Mole is scornful of her brother, since as you've seen he has no interest whatever in all this ancient history, and never puts on mourning for the thirtieth of April. Ever since this famous execution, and in order to commemorate de La Mole's close friendship with Coconasso—who, being Italian, was named Annibal—every man in the de La Mole family bears that name. And," added the academician, lowering his voice, "this Coconasso, according to Charles IX himself, was one of the most savage of all the murderers, in the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacres of twenty-four August, 1572...But how can it be possible, my dear Sorel, that you've not known these things, you who live in this house?" "You've just explained to me why, twice, at dinner tonight, Mademoiselle de La Mole called her brother Annibal. I thought I'd misheard her." "She was scolding him. What odd tricks she plays!" He followed these remarks with five or six ironical observations. Julien was shocked by the glow of high intimacy in the academician's eyes. "Here we have two servants being malicious about our masters," he thought. But nothing this academic might say would have surprised him. One day, Julien had stumbled on him, down on his knees in front of the Marquise de La Mole, begging that a nephew of his, who lived in the provinces, be given a collectorship of the tobacco tax. And that night, a young chambermaid of Mathilde's who, just like Elisa, had been wooing him, put in his head the idea that her mistress's mourning garb was not at all a way of getting attention. This extremely queer notion reached right to the depths of his soul. Mathilde actually loved the long-dead de La Mole, dearly beloved of the most intelligent queen of her time, and a man who had died while trying to liberate his friends. And what friends! The first Prince of the Blood, and the future King Henry IV. Accustomed to the perfect simplicity that glowed in everything Madame de Rênal said and did, all Julien had seen in Parisian women was affectation; and, whenever his mood was melancholic, he had nothing to say to them. Mademoiselle de La Mole was an exception. He began to understand that the standard for beauty, as he could observe it among aristocratic women, did not necessarily involve coldness of heart. He had long after-dinner conversations with Mademoiselle de La Mole, who would sometimes walk in the garden with him, by the drawing room's open windows. She told him, one day, that she was reading d'Aubigné's history, and the stories of Brantôme.6 "What strange things for her to read," thought Julien, "when the marquise won't let her have Walter Scott's novels!"7 One day she told him, her eyes gleaming with pleasure—showing how sincerely she admired it—the tale of what a young woman had done, in the days of Henry III. She had just been reading the story, in l'Etoile's Memoirs: finding her husband unfaithful, the young woman had stabbed him.