Michael Hone

Cinq-Mars Michael Hone

CINQ-MARS had every asset, beauty, brains and the body of a tireless 16-year-old when he entered the court of Louis XIII, where he cornered girls not pretty enough to be brought to his apartments, with a side-room of 300 pairs of boots, trousers lined with silk and wigs on stands placed on lacquered tables. The girls he cornered were given what we today would call the Valentino stare, and with his face inches from each he would look into her eyes while directing her hand to his hardness, and depending on the reaction he would walk away and find another, or press her against the wall, raising and lowering the intruding clothing, and only the slight but easily identifiable movements of his breeches-clad buttocks betrayed the thrusts, while all around men conversed among themselves, fleetingly glancing in the coupled couple's direction, brief snickers, envious glimpses, perhaps envious of her, perhaps of him, while the ladies who had already been so honored were perhaps satiated, perhaps wished for still another interlude, and the others, still virgin of Cinq-Mars, knew their turn would eventually come. Richelieu had been a friend of the Cinq-Mars family long before the boy's birth, and looking down at him in his cradle, could he have already imagined how he would use the lad as his personal spy, placing him in Louis' bed so that Richelieu could rule France by first ruling Louis XIII? A boy whose destiny was to inspire love, eventually murdered by two serpents, one on a throne, the other looking down into the baby's crib. This is the story of that destiny, from cradle to coffin, at age 22.