Raoul thought it would be only prudent not to reveal himself until he had reached the heart of his good city. He drew his cape over his moustache and recommended that Claude Vignet likewise veil the radiance of his Apollonian face beneath a flap of his grey felt cap.

Passing through the Saint-Victor gate, they followed the banks of the Bièvre river, cutting through the green fields which stretched out on either side. As they approached the Ile de la Cité, Spifame confided to his favourite that he would never have undertaken an expedition this arduous, that he would never have adopted an incognito this humiliating had he not been moved by considerations far more serious than his own liberty and power. The poor fellow was in fact racked with jealousy! Jealousy of whom? Of the duchess de Valentinois, of his lovely mistress Diane de Poitiers, whom he had not seen in some time and who, in the absence of her royal paramour, was probably betraying him with all and sundry. ‘Patience,’ said Claude Vignet, ‘I am mentally sharpening a number of epigrams worthy of Martial that will punish her flightiness. Souvent femme varie, as your father François put it so well, “Woman is a various thing! …” ’ Lost in conversation, they made their way through the crowded streets of the Right Bank and soon found themselves in a rather large square near the Church of the Innocents, which, since it was market day, was already thronged.

Observing the hubbub in the square, Spifame could barely contain his joy. ‘Friend,’ he said to the poet, whose attention was taken up by a shoe he had just lost en route, ‘look at the emotion on the faces of all these townsmen and cavaliers, see how their features are fierce with wrath, see how the seeds of discontent and sedition float through the lower firmament. Do you see that man over there with his halberd? Oh, I sense these poor people are about to rise up and provoke a civil war! But how could I order my arquebusiers to fire on men whose only crime today is their desire to help me carry out my projects, even though tomorrow they may well be guilty of no longer respecting my authority?’

‘Mobile vulgus,’ said Vignet.

V

The Market Place

Upon directing his eyes towards the middle of the square, Spifame was filled with surprise and anger. Vignet asked him what was wrong. ‘Can’t you see,’ replied the irritated king, ‘that lantern on the pillory which has been left standing despite my orders? The pillory, my dear man, has been abolished. This shall cost the Lord Mayor and town magistrates dearly, despite the fact that my reforms have restricted my royal powers over the municipal authorities. But the people of Paris shall take justice into their own hands in this matter.’

‘Sire,’ the poet observed, ‘don’t you think that your subjects will be even more aggrieved when they discover that the distich engraved on this fountain (composed by the poet du Bellay) contains two prosodic errors – a hexameter featuring the words humida sceptra (which are metrically disallowed, despite Horace) and a pentameter with an incorrect caesura.’

‘Hear ye!’ shouted Spifame without paying much mind to the poet’s comments. ‘Hear ye! Good people of Paris, gather around us and lend us your ears.’

‘Come hear your king! He desires to speak to you in his royal person,’ Claude Vignet chimed in, shouting at the top of his lungs.

Both had climbed up on a large rock which was surmounted by an iron cross: Spifame was standing, while Claude Vignet sat at his feet. A large crowd had gathered; the people in front initially imagined that they were vendors of potions or singers of ballads or carols. But Raoul Spifame suddenly took off his cap and threw back his cape to reveal a sparkling chain of royal insignia made of glass baubles, a regal adornment they had let him wear in prison just to humour his incurable mania. As he stood there dominating the crowd, his face illuminated by a ray of sun, it was impossible not to recognize the true image of King Henri II, who was sometimes spotted crossing the city on horseback.

‘Verily!’ Claude Vignet shouted to the astonished crowd. ‘Verily this is King Henri II whom you see standing before you, accompanied by the illustrious poet Claudius Vignetus, his minister and favourite, whose poetical works you no doubt all know by heart.’

‘Good people of Paris,’ Spifame broke in, ‘be apprised of the blackest of infamies. Our ministers are all traitors, our judges are all felons! Your beloved king has been held in barbarous captivity, as were the first kings of his line, as was King Charles VI, his illustrious ancestor …’

Hearing these words, the crowd began murmuring in awe. The astonishment spread far and wide; everywhere people were shouting: ‘The king! The king!’ The strange revelation was discussed on all sides; but some people still had doubts, until Claude Vignet pulled from his pocket the roll of royal edicts, decrees and proclamations and proceeded to distribute them to the crowd, throwing in some of his own compositions for good measure.

‘As you see,’ said the king, ‘these are the edicts we issued for the good of our people, none of which was ever made public or put into execution.’

‘These,’ said Vignet, ‘are the poems that the frauds Pierre de Ronsard and Mellin de Saint-Gelais conspired to steal from us.’

‘Town and country are being tyrannized in our name!’

‘The Sophonisbe and the Franciade are circulating in print without the signed permission of the king!’

‘Hear these decrees rescinding the salt tax and abolishing tallage!’

‘Hear this sonnet, whose syllables follow the rules of Latin prosody!’

But Spifame’s and Vignet’s words were already lost in the commotion. The papers that had been distributed to the crowd and read from group to group were receiving a chorus of approval. The monarch and his poet were hoisted shoulder-high on a makeshift platform, and there was talk of marching on the Hôtel de Ville and then waiting there for reinforcements before attacking the Louvre, stronghold of the traitors.

The crowd would have most likely been driven to considerable extremes in its enthusiasm had not the new wife of the Dauphin, Mary of Scotland, been scheduled to make her solemn entry into the city through the gate of Saint-Denis that very same day.6 As a result, while Raoul Spifame was being triumphantly carried about the market place, the horseback procession of the true King Henri II was proceeding along the moats of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Hearing all the commotion near by, several of his officers galloped off and immediately returned to inform him that a king was being proclaimed in the market place. ‘Let’s go and have a look,’ said Henri II. ‘If the fellow bloody well wants to fight (he swore just like his father), we’ll oblige him.’

Seeing the king’s halberdiers advancing upon the square, portions of the crowd began to flee into the side streets. The spectacle was, in truth, quite awesome. The king’s household regiment took up position on the square, while the lansquenets, arquebusiers and Swiss guards fanned out through the neighbouring streets. M. de Bassompierre was at the king’s side, and Henri II’s chest gleamed with the diamonds of all the royal orders of Europe. Bewildered, unable to move because all exits had been blocked, the crowd just stood there agape. There were shouts that a miracle had just occurred, for before their eyes they saw two kings of France: both pale, both proud, both more or less dressed the same, except that the good king seemed somewhat less resplendent.

Panic erupted when the guards rode into the crowd.