Maitre Cornelius

The hidden treasure

Louis XI. was fond of intervening in the affairs of his subjects, and he was always ready to mingle his royal majesty with the burgher life.  This taste, severely blamed by some historians, was really only a passion for the “incognito,” one of the greatest pleasures of princes, —­a sort of momentary abdication, which enables them to put a little real life into their existence, made insipid by the lack of opposition.  Louis XI., however, played the incognito openly.  On these occasions he was always the good fellow, endeavoring to please the people of the middle classes, whom he made his allies against feudality.  For some time past he had found no opportunity to “make himself populace” and espouse the domestic interests of some man “engarrie” (an old word still used in Tours, meaning engaged) in litigious affairs, so that he shouldered the anxieties of Maitre Cornelius eagerly, and also the secret sorrows of the Comtesse de Saint-Vallier.  Several times during dinner he said to his daughter:—­

“Who, think you, could have robbed my silversmith?  The robberies now amount to over twelve hundred thousand crowns in eight years.  Twelve hundred thousand crowns, messieurs!” he continued, looking at the seigneurs who were serving him.  “Notre Dame! with a sum like that what absolutions could be bought in Rome!  And I might, Pasques-Dieu! bank the Loire, or, better still, conquer Piedmont, a fine fortification ready-made for this kingdom.”

When dinner was over, Louis XI. took his daughter, his doctor, and the grand provost, with an escort of soldiers, and rode to the hotel de Poitiers in Tours, where he found, as he expected, the Comte de Saint-Vallier awaiting his wife, perhaps to make away with her life.

“Monsieur,” said the king, “I told you to start at once.  Say farewell to your wife now, and go to the frontier; you will be accompanied by an escort of honor.  As for your instructions and credentials, they will be in Venice before you get there.”

Louis then gave the order—­not without adding certain secret instructions—­to a lieutenant of the Scottish guard to take a squad of men and accompany the ambassador to Venice.  Saint-Vallier departed in haste, after giving his wife a cold kiss which he would fain have made deadly.  Louis XI. then crossed over to the Malemaison, eager to begin the unravelling of the melancholy comedy, lasting now for eight years, in the house of his silversmith; flattering himself that, in his quality of king, he had enough penetration to discover the secret of the robberies.  Cornelius did not see the arrival of the escort of his royal master without uneasiness.

“Are all those persons to take part in the inquiry?” he said to the king.

Louis XI. could not help smiling as he saw the fright of the miser and his sister.

“No, my old crony,” he said; “don’t worry yourself.  They will sup at Plessis, and you and I alone will make the investigation.  I am so good in detecting criminals, that I will wager you ten thousand crowns I shall do so now.”

“Find him, sire, and make no wager.”

They went at once into the strong room, where the Fleming kept his treasure.  There Louis, who asked to see, in the first place, the casket from which the jewels of the Duke of Burgundy had been taken, then the chimney down which the robber was supposed to have descended, easily convinced his silversmith of the falsity of the latter supposition, inasmuch as there was no soot on the hearth,—­where, in truth, a fire was seldom made,—­and no sign that any one had passed down the flue; and moreover that the chimney issued at a part of the roof which was almost inaccessible.  At last, after two hours of close investigation, marked with that sagacity which distinguished the suspicious mind of Louis XI., it was clear to him, beyond all doubt, that no one had forced an entrance into the strong-room of his silversmith.  No marks of violence were on the locks, nor on the iron coffers which contained the gold, silver, and jewels deposited as securities by wealthy debtors.

“If the robber opened this box,” said the king, “why did he take nothing out of it but the jewels of the Duke of Bavaria?  What reason had he for leaving that pearl necklace which lay beside them?  A queer robber!”

At that remark the unhappy miser turned pale:  he and the king looked at each other for a moment.

“Then, sire, what did that robber whom you have taken under your protection come to do here, and why did he prowl about at night?”

“If you have not guessed why, my crony, I order you to remain in ignorance.  That is one of my secrets.”

“Then the devil is in my house!” cried the miser, piteously.

In any other circumstances the king would have laughed at his silversmith’s cry; but he had suddenly become thoughtful, and was casting on the Fleming those glances peculiar to men of talent and power which seem to penetrate the brain.  Cornelius was frightened, thinking he had in some way offended his dangerous master.

“Devil or angel, I have him, the guilty man!” cried Louis XI. abruptly.  “If you are robbed again to-night, I shall know to-morrow who did it.  Make that old hag you call your sister come here,” he added.

Cornelius almost hesitated to leave the king alone in the room with his hoards; but the bitter smile on Louis’s withered lips determined him.  Nevertheless he hurried back, followed by the old woman.

“Have you any flour?” demanded the king.

“Oh yes; we have laid in our stock for the winter,” she answered.

“Well, go and fetch some,” said the king.

“What do you want to do with our flour, sire?” she cried, not the least impressed by his royal majesty.

“Old fool!” said Cornelius, “go and execute the orders of our gracious master.  Shall the king lack flour?”

“Our good flour!” she grumbled, as she went downstairs.  “Ah! my flour!”

Then she returned, and said to the king:—­

“Sire, is it only a royal notion to examine my flour?”

At last she reappeared, bearing one of those stout linen bags which, from time immemorial, have been used in Touraine to carry or bring, to and from market, nuts, fruits, or wheat.  The bag was half full of flour.  The housekeeper opened it and showed it to the king, on whom she cast the rapid, savage look with which old maids appear to squirt venom upon men.

“It costs six sous the ‘septeree,’” she said.

“What does that matter?” said the king.  “Spread it on the floor; but be careful to make an even layer of it—­as if it had fallen like snow.”

The old maid did not comprehend.  This proposal astonished her as though the end of the world had come.

“My flour, sire! on the ground!  But—­”

Maitre Cornelius, who was beginning to understand, though vaguely, the intentions of the king, seized the bag and gently poured its contents on the floor.  The old woman quivered, but she held out her hand for the empty bag, and when her brother gave it back to her she disappeared with a heavy sigh.

Cornelius then took a feather broom and gently smoothed the flour till it looked like a fall of snow, retreating step by step as he did so, followed by the king, who seemed much amused by the operation.  When they reached the door Louis XI. said to his silversmith, “Are there two keys to the lock?”

“No, sire.”

The king then examined the structure of the door, which was braced with large plates and bars of iron, all of which converged to a secret lock, the key of which was kept by Cornelius.

After examining everything, the king sent for Tristan, and ordered him to post several of his men for the night, and with the greatest secrecy, in the mulberry trees on the embankment and on the roofs of the adjoining houses, and to assemble at once the rest of his men and escort him back to Plessis, so as to give the idea in the town that he himself would not sup with Cornelius.  Next, he told the miser to close his windows with the utmost care, that no single ray of light should escape from the house, and then he departed with much pomp for Plessis along the embankment; but there he secretly left his escort, and returned by a door in the ramparts to the house of the torconnier.  All these precautions were so well taken that the people of Tours really thought the king had returned to Plessis, and would sup on the morrow with Cornelius.

Towards eight o’clock that evening, as the king was supping with his physician, Cornelius, and the captain of his guard, and holding much jovial converse, forgetting for the time being that he was ill and in danger of death, the deepest silence reigned without, and all passers, even the wariest robber, would have believed that the Malemaison was occupied as usual.

“I hope,” said the king, laughing, “that my silversmith shall be robbed to-night, so that my curiosity may be satisfied.  Therefore, messieurs, no one is to leave his chamber to-morrow morning without my order, under pain of grievous punishment.”

Thereupon, all went to bed.  The next morning, Louis XI. was the first to leave his apartment, and he went at once to the door of the strong-room.  He was not a little astonished to see, as he went along, the marks of a large foot along the stairways and corridors of the house.  Carefully avoiding those precious footprints, he followed them to the door of the treasure-room, which he found locked without a sign of fracture or defacement.  Then he studied the direction of the steps; but as they grew gradually fainter, they finally left not the slightest trace, and it was impossible for him to discover where the robber had fled.

“Ho, crony!” called out the king, “you have been finely robbed this time.”

At these words the old Fleming hurried out of his chamber, visibly terrified.  Louis XI. made him look at the foot-prints on the stairs and corridors, and while examining them himself for the second time, the king chanced to observe the miser’s slippers and recognized the type of sole that was printed in flour on the corridors.  He said not a word, and checked his laughter, remembering the innocent men who had been hanged for the crime.  The miser now hurried to his treasure.  Once in the room the king ordered him to make a new mark with his foot beside those already existing, and easily convinced him that the robber of his treasure was no other than himself.

“The pearl necklace is gone!” cried Cornelius.  “There is sorcery in this.  I never left my room.”

“We’ll know all about it now,” said the king; the evident truthfulness of his silversmith making him still more thoughtful.

He immediately sent for the men he had stationed on the watch and asked:—­

“What did you see during the night?”

“Oh, sire!” said the lieutenant, “an amazing sight!  Your silversmith crept down the side of the wall like a cat; so lightly that he seemed to be a shadow.”

“I!” exclaimed Cornelius; after that one word, he remained silent, and stood stock-still like a man who has lost the use of his limbs.

“Go away, all of you,” said the king, addressing the archers, “and tell Messieurs Conyngham, Coyctier, Bridore, and also Tristan, to leave their rooms and come here to mine.—­You have incurred the penalty of death,” he said to Cornelius, who, happily, did not hear him.  “You have ten murders on your conscience!”

Thereupon Louis XI. gave a silent laugh, and made a pause.  Presently, remarking the strange pallor on the Fleming’s face, he added:—­

“You need not be uneasy; you are more valuable to bleed than to kill.  You can get out of the claws of my justice by payment of a good round sum to my treasury, but if you don’t build at least one chapel in honor of the Virgin, you are likely to find things hot for you throughout eternity.”

“Twelve hundred and thirty, and eighty-seven thousand crowns, make thirteen hundred and seventeen thousand crowns,” replied Cornelius mechanically, absorbed in his calculations.  “Thirteen hundred and seventeen thousand crowns hidden somewhere!”

“He must have buried them in some hiding-place,” muttered the king, beginning to think the sum royally magnificent.  “That was the magnet that invariably brought him back to Tours.  He felt his treasure.”

Coyctier entered at this moment.  Noticing the attitude of Maitre Cornelius, he watched him narrowly while the king related the adventure.

“Sire,” replied the physician, “there is nothing supernatural in that.  Your silversmith has the faculty of walking in his sleep.  This is the third case I have seen of that singular malady.  If you would give yourself the amusement of watching him at such times, you would see that old man stepping without danger at the very edge of the roof.  I noticed in the two other cases I have already observed, a curious connection between the actions of that nocturnal existence and the interests and occupations of their daily life.”

“Ah!  Maitre Coyctier, you are a wise man.”

“I am your physician,” replied the other, insolently.

At this answer, Louis XI. made the gesture which was customary with him when a good idea was presented to his mind; he shoved up his cap with a hasty motion.

“At such times,” continued Coyctier, “persons attend to their business while asleep.  As this man is fond of hoarding, he has simply pursued his dearest habit.  No doubt each of these attacks have come on after a day in which he has felt some fears about the safety of his treasure.”

“Pasques-Dieu! and such treasure!” cried the king.

“Where is it?” asked Cornelius, who, by a singular provision of nature, heard the remarks of the king and his physician, while continuing himself almost torpid with thought and the shock of this singular misfortune.

“Ha!” cried Coyctier, bursting into a diabolical, coarse laugh, “somnambulists never remember on their waking what they have done when asleep.”

“Leave us,” said the king.

When Louis XI. was alone with his silversmith, he looked at him and chuckled coldly.

“Messire Hoogworst,” he said, with a nod, “all treasures buried in France belong to the king.”

“Yes, sire, all is yours; you are the absolute master of our lives and fortunes; but, up to this moment, you have only taken what you need.”

“Listen to me, old crony; if I help you to recover this treasure, you can surely, and without fear, agree to divide it with me.”

“No, sire, I will not divide it; I will give it all to you, at my death.  But what scheme have you for finding it?”

“I shall watch you myself when you are taking your nocturnal tramps.  You might fear any one but me.”

“Ah, sire!” cried Cornelius, flinging himself at the king’s feet, “you are the only man in the kingdom whom I would trust for such a service; and I will try to prove my gratitude for your goodness, by doing my utmost to promote the marriage of the Burgundian heiress with Monseigneur.  She will bring you a noble treasure, not of money, but of lands, which will round out the glory of your crown.”

“There, there, Dutchman, you are trying to hoodwink me,” said the king, with frowning brows, “or else you have already done so.”

“Sire! can you doubt my devotion? you, who are the only man I love!”

“All that is talk,” returned the king, looking the other in the eyes.  “You need not have waited till this moment to do me that service.  You are selling me your influence—­Pasques-Dieu! to me, Louis XI.!  Are you the master, and am I your servant?”

“Ah, sire,” said the old man, “I was waiting to surprise you agreeably with news of the arrangements I had made for you in Ghent; I was awaiting confirmation from Oosterlinck through that apprentice.  What has become of that young man?”

“Enough!” said the king; “this is only one more blunder you have committed.  I do not like persons to meddle in my affairs without my knowledge.  Enough! leave me; I wish to reflect upon all this.”

Maitre Cornelius found the agility of youth to run downstairs to the lower rooms where he was certain to find his sister.

“Ah!  Jeanne, my dearest soul, a hoard is hidden in this house; I have put thirteen hundred thousand crowns and all the jewels somewhere.  I, I, I am the robber!”

Jeanne Hoogworst rose from her stool and stood erect as if the seat she quitted were of red-hot iron.  This shock was so violent for an old maid accustomed for years to reduce herself by voluntary fasts, that she trembled in every limb, and horrible pains were in her back.  She turned pale by degrees, and her face,—­the changes in which were difficult to decipher among its wrinkles,—­became distorted while her brother explained to her the malady of which he was the victim, and the extraordinary situation in which he found himself.

“Louis XI. and I,” he said in conclusion, “have just been lying to each other like two pedlers of coconuts.  You understand, my girl, that if he follows me, he will get the secret of the hiding-place.  The king alone can watch my wanderings at night.  I don’t feel sure that his conscience, near as he is to death, can resist thirteen hundred thousand crowns.  We must be beforehand with him; we must find the hidden treasure and send it to Ghent, and you alone—­”

Cornelius stopped suddenly, and seemed to be weighing the heart of the sovereign who had had thoughts of parricide at twenty-two years of age.  When his judgment of Louis XI. was concluded, he rose abruptly like a man in haste to escape a pressing danger.  At this instant, his sister, too feeble or too strong for such a crisis, fell stark; she was dead.  Maitre Cornelius seized her, and shook her violently, crying out: 

“You cannot die now.  There is time enough later—­Oh! it is all over.  The old hag never could do anything at the right time.”

He closed her eyes and laid her on the floor.  Then the good and noble feelings which lay at the bottom of his soul came back to him, and, half forgetting his hidden treasure, he cried out mournfully:—­

“Oh! my poor companion, have I lost you?—­you who understood me so well!  Oh! you were my real treasure.  There it lies, my treasure!  With you, my peace of mind, my affections, all, are gone.  If you had only known what good it would have done me to live two nights longer, you would have lived, solely to please me, my poor sister!  Ah, Jeanne! thirteen hundred thousand crowns!  Won’t that wake you?—­No, she is dead!”

Thereupon, he sat down, and said no more; but two great tears issued from his eyes and rolled down his hollow cheeks; then, with strange exclamations of grief, he locked up the room and returned to the king.  Louis XI. was struck with the expression of sorrow on the moistened features of his old friend.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

“Ah! sire, misfortunes never come singly.  My sister is dead.  She precedes me there below,” he said, pointing to the floor with a dreadful gesture.

“Enough!” cried Louis XI., who did not like to hear of death.

“I make you my heir.  I care for nothing now.  Here are my keys.  Hang me, if that’s your good pleasure.  Take all, ransack the house; it is full of gold.  I give up all to you—­”

“Come, come, crony,” replied Louis XI., who was partly touched by the sight of this strange suffering, “we shall find your treasure some fine night, and the sight of such riches will give you heart to live.  I will come back in the course of this week—­”

“As you please, sire.”

At that answer the king, who had made a few steps toward the door of the chamber, turned round abruptly.  The two men looked at each other with an expression that neither pen nor pencil can reproduce.

“Adieu, my crony,” said Louis XI. at last in a curt voice, pushing up his cap.

“May God and the Virgin keep you in their good graces!” replied the silversmith humbly, conducting the king to the door of the house.

After so long a friendship, the two men found a barrier raised between them by suspicion and gold; though they had always been like one man on the two points of gold and suspicion.  But they knew each other so well, they had so completely the habit, one may say, of each other, that the king could divine, from the tone in which Cornelius uttered the words, “As you please, sire,” the repugnance that his visits would henceforth cause to the silversmith, just as the latter recognized a declaration of war in the “Adieu, my crony,” of the king.

Thus Louis XI. and his torconnier parted much in doubt as to the conduct they ought in future to hold to each other.  The monarch possessed the secret of the Fleming; but on the other hand, the latter could, by his connections, bring about one of the finest acquisitions that any king of France had ever made; namely, that of the domains of the house of Burgundy, which the sovereigns of Europe were then coveting.  The marriage of the celebrated Marguerite depended on the people of Ghent and the Flemings who surrounded her.  The gold and the influence of Cornelius could powerfully support the negotiations now begun by Desquerdes, the general to whom Louis XI. had given the command of the army encamped on the frontiers of Belgium.  These two master-foxes were, therefore, like two duellists, whose arms are paralyzed by chance.

So, whether it were that from that day the king’s health failed and went from bad to worse, or that Cornelius did assist in bringing into France Marguerite of Burgundy—­who arrived at Ambroise in July, 1438, to marry the Dauphin to whom she was betrothed in the chapel of the castle—­certain it is that the king took no steps in the matter of the hidden treasure; he levied no tribute from his silversmith, and the pair remained in the cautious condition of an armed friendship.  Happily for Cornelius a rumor was spread about Tours that his sister was the actual robber, and that she had been secretly put to death by Tristan.  Otherwise, if the true history had been known, the whole town would have risen as one man to destroy the Malemaison before the king could have taken measures to protect it.

But, although these historical conjectures have some foundation so far as the inaction of Louis XI. is concerned, it is not so as regards Cornelius Hoogworst.  There was no inaction there.  The silversmith spent the first days which succeeded that fatal night in ceaseless occupation.  Like carnivorous animals confined in cages, he went and came, smelling for gold in every corner of his house; he studied the cracks and crevices, he sounded the walls, he besought the trees of the garden, the foundations of the house, the roofs of the turrets, the earth and the heavens, to give him back his treasure.  Often he stood motionless for hours, casting his eyes on all sides, plunging them into the void.  Striving for the miracles of ecstasy and the powers of sorcery, he tried to see his riches through space and obstacles.  He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought, consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury, —­a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the miseries of life and in those of death.

Never was a Vice more punished by itself.  A miser, locked by accident into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has, like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth.  But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his treasure,—­a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture.  Sometimes, becoming forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of his door wide open, and then the passers in the street could see that already wizened man, planted on his two legs in the midst of his untilled garden, absolutely motionless, and casting on those who watched him a fixed gaze, the insupportable light of which froze them with terror.  If, by chance, he walked through the streets of Tours, he seemed like a stranger in them; he knew not where he was, nor whether the sun or the moon were shining.  Often he would ask his way of those who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to be in search of something lost.

The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel claws perpetually into his heart.  Then, in the midst of this torture, Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments.  Two men had his secret, the secret he did not know himself.  Louis XI. or Coyctier could post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown gulf into which he had cast his riches,—­those riches he had watered with the blood of so many innocent men.  And then, beside his fear, arose Remorse.

In order to prevent during his lifetime the abduction of his hidden treasure, he took the most cruel precautions against sleep; besides which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining powerful anti-narcotics.  His struggles to keep awake were awful—­alone with night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that man, instinctively perhaps, has best embodied—­obedient thus to a moral truth as yet devoid of actual proof.

At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succumbed to the horrors of the torture he had himself created.  Maddened by certain thoughts more agonizing than those he had as yet resisted, he cut his throat with a razor.

This death coincided, almost, with that of Louis XI.  Nothing then restrained the populace, and Malemaison, that Evil House, was pillaged.  A tradition exists among the older inhabitants of Touraine that a contractor of public works, named Bohier, found the miser’s treasure and used it in the construction of Chenonceaux, that marvellous chateau which, in spite of the wealth of several kings and the taste of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de’ Medici for building, remains unfinished to the present day.

Happily for Marie de Sassenage, the Comte de Saint-Vallier died, as we know, in his embassy.  The family did not become extinct.  After the departure of the count, the countess gave birth to a son, whose career was famous in the history of France under the reign of Francois I. He was saved by his daughter, the celebrated Diane de Poitiers, the illegitimate great-granddaughter of Louis XI., who became the illegitimate wife, the beloved mistress of Henri II.—­for bastardy and love were hereditary in that family of nobles.