Chapter 1 ©

I do not believe it would be out of place—although we are not intimately acquainted—if I shared a history of events that occurred earlier in my life. It is said that strangers make the best listeners, even confessors. Confessor? Do not be alarmed, my friend. Be assured that I have nothing to confess and I do not seek a confessor. Indulge your elder, if you will.

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Welcome! I am always surprised when someone unexpectedly shows up at my door for a visit. I have so few visitors! Largely, my life is one of solitude here. I speak to the walls, alone in a mansion of words. Sometimes the walls of my home seem paper-thin. Nonetheless, they are substantial, very solid. My words bounce back at me. They never break through the walls to the greater world. They come back to haunt me, as it were, and I find that I am talking to myself.

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One visitor long ago said that my home was a graveyard, a crypt, or a morgue. This, a place of the dead? Hardly. I have never been livelier. The offensive guest—who did not stay long—even likened my home to a book whose gravestone was the date of publication behind a decorative frontispiece, the date when the language inside died! These laughable similes and metaphors are no less far-fetched than they are abusive of me and my life. My death cannot be chiseled on paper because I am not dead. I grant that my expression yearly becomes more and more antiquated. It may appear archaic to you as well. Bear with me. My words and manner of speaking may be out of fashion, but the secret they contain is as relevant today as it was the day it was created—created by me to prevent harm to the innocent.     

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I do not know if a stranger such as you makes a model listener, but, with folk wisdom in mind, I’ll unburden myself with a well-kept secret that I have for so long carried alone, leaving it to you to shoulder and pass on to others. If you do, I beg you not to elaborate. Stay true to the story I pass on to you in trust—and friendship.

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Some might say that I am being careless and rather forward to reveal what I know to someone I have never met before, but these are court gossip mongers. No friends of mine. You know the kind. Sycophants who buzz around the Queen’s ass like a swarm of gnats. Forward? I think not. You have, after all, entered here of your own volition. No one forced you to enter and I am not coercing you to stay and listen. Hardly! You are here because you want to be, because you want to know the secret I bear, because you want to resolve the mystery that has surrounded the incidents I confess here, though I bear no guilt, because you are unbearably curious. I have no reason not to trust you until you give me reason to show that my trust is misplaced. We have just met, yet it seems that I have known you for years—on my life, I cannot remember when we were first introduced. Do you feel the same, old friend? No? Pity. Yes?

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Welcome! I have been waiting for you!

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As I said, I have few visitors. Some have merely knocked on the wrong door and stop at the threshold before entering, realizing that they have the wrong address. Others are merely curious. Curiosity is what I believe brought you here. For some—and I believe this may be true of you—initial curiosity grows into an abiding inquisitiveness. The secret I hold, you will soon learn, is one that draws those who would fathom its depth into everything that surrounds it—its origin, history, and effects on those who would crack it open. 

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You will judge the veracity of my tale—for that is all it can be at this point in our relationship: a tale. Life has its ups and downs and twists and turns, as I am sure you know. We all suffer misfortunes. I am sorry to say—and I hope you will not be offended—that I see by your face that you have suffered.

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Still, we must get on with it. Is there a choice? Unless you take a coward’s way out—I also see in your face that you are no coward—we all sooner or later learn that turning the page is the best way to accept pain of any sort, whether of the body or the soul.

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For my part, I will tell you what you want to know as faithfully as it happened. At the end, you will judge its truthfulness. You may trust me on that. My God, where would we be without trust?

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Trust was a scarcity at the court of my beloved François I, King of France, Le Roi-Chevalier, the greatest king in Europe’s long history.

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The King’s Chancellor, Antoine Duprat, before he was ordained Cardinal, once told me that the trickeries of Luther and Calvin never deceived him—and could never deceive him precisely because he had the true faith before hearing their lies. Learn that lesson before we begin. You must be aware that truth precedes lies because deception is an altering of what comes before it. Truth is primary, deception secondary.

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Whatever his faults—and who is above personal failure? — I was, for the most part, in Duprat’s camp at court because his camp was, for the most part, the King’s camp, and my loyalty was with the King.

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For the most part.

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Is ‘camp’ the word for it? I think not. Faction? Circle? Neither. Alliance.