Sudden Death

Throat-slit

Rombaud’s trial was so short that by the time the wretch understood what was going on, he had been sentenced. He had been seized for high treason at the very doors of the Salon Bleu and found himself unable to explain how he, a Frenchman and a Catholic, had offered his services as executioner to the heretic King Henry of England. In the death warrant, which was drawn up in haste and signed in a courtyard of the Louvre by Philippe de Chabot, it was written that the fencing and tennis master possessed the nobleman’s right to have his throat slit without torture because the king had granted him privileges for life.

Lying on the ground, at the mercy of the soldier who was to perform the execution, the point of a sword pricking his neck, Rombaud wept. I understand, said Minister Chabot, that Anne Boleyn, a woman and a princess, didn’t shed a single tear the day you dispatched her as she lay helpless; if you give me the fourth ball, he added, I’ll let you go, and he motioned for the executioner to withdraw his sword.

The mercenary felt in his shirt and cloak and with shaking hand extracted a lumpy ball, the most dubious of those made with the remnants of the queen’s hair. Chabot put it in his pocket and said: Kill him.

The story must have traveled by word of mouth, since a bastardized version of it, based on elements of truth, lingered in the popular imagination. It’s very likely that the episode, turned upside down like everything that crosses the Channel, lit the lamp of inspiration in William Shakespeare’s head, since he chose to depict Henry V’s unexpected claim to all the territory of France in a lovely scene that reproduces the handing over of the ill-fated Boleyn balls.

In the play’s first act, King Henry receives a messenger from Louis of Valois, Dauphin of France, asking him to relinquish his claims to Normandy in exchange for the great treasure that he sends as a gift. The gift is a sealed barrel. The king asks the duke of Exeter to open it, and inside there are only tennis balls: a mockery of his political immaturity and lack of experience. Henry thinks it over and very coolly sends his thanks for the gift, saying: “When we have match’d our racquets to these balls, / We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set / Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.”

At the height of the Enlightenment, during an exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin regarding the sale of his library to Catherine II of Russia, Denis Diderot describes how the preparations for his daughter’s wedding have left him in a state of financial strangulation: “At first, my wife and I thought that the match would go some way toward easing the pressure of our creditors, and now we consider ourselves lucky if it doesn’t kill us in the end. For me, Angelique’s engagement has been the story of Rombaud’s balls.”

That very night, at the back door of his workshop, the craftsman who had made the Boleyn balls received a bundle of the mercenary’s firebolt-chased chestnut hair.