The Ambitious Monsieur La Rivière

Paris was in utter chaos at the time, but as far as Louis knew, its people could roughly be divided into the following ranks—at the very top were, of course, the King, the King's brother, and the Queen Mother; next came royal relatives and great nobles such as Prince of Condé and Gaston, Duke of Orléans; immediately beneath them were the cardinals; those qualified to stand against the cardinals were the esteemed marshals and generals; only then came the root of the rebellion—the members of Parlement, financiers, and great moneylenders, along with the intendants hated by the former; below them were lawyers, ordinary clergymen, and physicians; then came stockbrokers and merchants; serving all these people were painters, architects, sculptors, and writers of fiction, while beneath them were craftsmen, servants, the urban poor, and peasants beyond the city.

Besides these, there were probably also people who lived by serving the royal family and nobility. Like schools of fish following whales through the sea, they fed on the scraps left behind by those they served. More specifically, they included private chaplains, clerks, stewards and overseers, policemen, agents, attendants, cooks, servants, and coachmen.

During the earlier Fronde movement, apart from the private armies and guards of the nobles and judges, the greatest number had been Parisian citizens—the very people who should have been loyal to Louis. Yet there was reason enough why they had been so easily incited. Compared with those who, favored or entrusted by the King, could rake in money without restraint and squander it extravagantly—such as Richelieu—the common people of Paris had always lived in unbearable hardship. Not only did they bear crushing taxes, they also had to pay rent, water fees, bread money, and all manner of charges with no clear name. The places they lived had windows without glass and broken doors. Some simply lit fires on the floors of their rooms to cook. They were often ill, yet had no money for treatment. Some could not even afford to marry a wife. Sometimes it was only when landlords came to collect rent that they discovered their tenants had already died. And amid a life of suffering with scarcely any end in sight, people continued to press down upon them.

Although Louis still could not interfere in state affairs, he had heard a little of certain matters. For instance, bread in Paris was now nearly twenty sous a pound.

Here, it was necessary to briefly mention the French monetary system of the mid-seventeenth century. Livres and sous were familiar terms, but neither was a circulating currency; they were merely units of account. One livre was roughly equivalent to half a pound to one pound of silver, and also equaled twenty sous. Thus, seventeenth-century Frenchmen mostly used gold louis, large écus, small écus, deniers, and liards. A gold louis, as its name implied, was a gold coin. One gold louis equaled twelve to twenty livres, with one livre equal to twenty sous. One large silver écu equaled six livres and twelve sous; one small silver écu equaled three livres and six sous; one sou equaled twenty copper deniers; and one denier was equivalent to three copper liards.

In other words, converted into currency familiar to us, a pound of bread cost roughly three hundred to five hundred yuan.

Such prices were enough to bring an entire region, even a nation, to collapse. Yet after Queen Mother Anne returned to Paris, a single Mass consumed one hundred gold louis' worth of candles and spices. Leaving aside everything else, Louis sometimes truly wished she would stop praying. It would be better to exchange those hundred gold louis for a hundred pounds of bread. At least a hundred families would then be deeply grateful to the royal family, rather than filled with resentment.

Unfortunately, he could not persuade Queen Mother Anne. People of this era had no concept of charity. If a man was starving to death, it was because he had not worked hard enough; if he fell ill, it was because he had committed evil deeds, and it was God's punishment or retribution. Even Cardinal Mazarin did not agree with Louis's method. Those gleaming silver écus and glittering gold "louis" could be used to purchase exquisite clothes, delicious food, horses, hunting guns, or even tossed onto a gaming table without concern—but to aid the poor... it was too strange, too strange. No one had ever done such a thing.

Mazarin firmly refused, and almost everyone around Louis shared the same view. They believed that giving bread to the poor for nothing would only create more idlers and rogues. Moreover, if such an act could not be sustained, the person responsible would surely be hated—on that point, at least, they were not wrong. Louis therefore changed his approach and asked Mazarin to thoroughly investigate Paris's wheat merchants, to see whether anyone was hoarding goods and driving up prices. Mazarin did not answer him. Instead, he asked the King when he intended to receive the person the cardinal had selected regarding the matter Louis had previously raised—the questions he wished to ask about the Inquisition.

The moment Mazarin said this, Louis knew the matter could not be pursued any further. He knew Mazarin must have accepted bribes from merchants. Such things had become almost commonplace at court, dating back as far as the reign of Philip IV. Ministers crowded around the King, fighting for his favor, then used that favor to amass wealth without restraint. Richelieu had done so, and Mazarin did so as well. He was even willing to yield on certain matters, so that the young King would no longer investigate.

The matter Louis had mentioned before concerned the royal family, the Church, and the Inquisition—the win-win relationship between the surface world and the hidden world. The clergyman Louis had once met had arrived. That clergyman was quite pleased, for he had originally been no more than an abbot. He was neither a black-robed judge of the Inquisition nor an ascetic monk who acted as an executor.

Speaking of which, he had recently made a laughingstock of himself. Because he believed he had won great merit during the previous werewolf riots, he had even intended to compete with Retz, the coadjutor archbishop of Paris, and Prince of Conti, Prince of Condé's younger brother, for a hat from Rome—meaning a cardinal's hat. Naturally, he had failed in a manner that was almost comical, and had become the laughingstock of all Paris.

He had not been discouraged. Truly, Monsieur La Rivière might not have had many other virtues, but he possessed a desire for power and wealth far beyond that of ordinary men. Thus, the King could learn more from him than from anyone else. And so, in order to keep the King from continuing to concern himself with wheat and bread, Mazarin had sent him here.

It was Abbot La Rivière's first time entering Richelieu's residence. A mansion fit to serve as the King's temporary palace naturally could not be shabby or cramped. It was an H-shaped complex of buildings, each three stories high. Along the outside of the lowest floor ran colonnades supported by countless Doric columns, adorned with all kinds of sculptures and named after them. For instance, the Ship's-Prow Gallery Abbot La Rivière was passing through now had received its name because its walls were decorated with many sculptures related to seafaring vessels.

Beyond the Ship's-Prow Gallery lay a rectangular garden arranged symmetrically along an axis. The garden was some six hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide. At its center stood a perfectly round fountain like a full moon, surrounded by neatly trimmed trees. Though it was the depths of winter and no flowers gave forth their fragrance, the air carried a clean scent... yes, Abbot La Rivière did not know how else to describe it, but it was... that sort of... clean scent. It was comforting.

Ah, he was especially clean today as well. He had made inquiries in every direction about the King's preferences, and almost everyone had been deeply impressed by the King's demands for cleanliness. As mentioned before, people of this era did not dislike being clean. First, bathing was expensive; second, the Church did not encourage frequent bathing; third, there was fear of the not-long-departed Black Death... But they did not truly let themselves live in filth. They still wiped their bodies with clean linen and warm water, especially their faces and hands, with women adding their breasts as well. Nobles changed their clothes even more frequently, almost once every few hours. Thus, although Paris's streets reeked to high heaven, aside from poor people who could not even scrape together an extra scrap of cloth, those with a little means did not smell quite so dreadful.

But their King could only be called exacting in this regard. And his preferences—even though he had not yet begun to rule in person—had affected everyone around him. Abbot La Rivière wished to win the King's favor and had gone to considerable trouble. Besides washing himself spotlessly clean, he had also sprinkled himself with perfume imported from Cologne, Germany. It was an expensive and marvelous liquid, dearer than gold, but it was all worth it, because the young King looked up, saw him, and smiled.