‘History is a novel that has been lived’

E. & J. DE GONCOURT

‘It is terrifying to think how much research is needed to determine the truth of even the most unimportant fact’

STENDHAL

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Foreword

The Characters in this Book

Family Tree

The Royal Succession

Prologue

Part One: Philippe and the Closed Gates

1. The White Queen

2. The Cardinal who Did not Believe in Hell

3. The Gates of Lyons

4. Let us Dry our Tears

5. The Gates of the Conclave

6. From Neauphle to Saint-Marcel

7. The Gates of the Palace

8. The Count of Poitiers’s Visits

9. Friday’s Child

10. The Assembly of the Three Dynasties

11. The Betrothed Play Tag

Part Two: Artois and the Conclave

1. The Arrival of Count Robert

2. The Pope’s Lombard

3. The Wages of Sin

4. We Must Go to War

5. The Regent’s Army Takes a Prisoner

Part Three: From Mourning to Coronation

1. A Wet-nurse for the King

2. Leave it to God

3. Bouville’s Trick

4. My Lords, Look on the King

5. A Lombard in Saint-Denis

6. France in Firm Hands

7. Shattered Dreams

8. Departures

9. The Eve of the Coronation

10. The Bells of Rheims

Historical Notes

Footnotes

Author’s Acknowledgments

By Maurice Druon

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN

Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment. I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth. My own series draws on both traditions … and while I undoubtedly drew much of my inspiration from Tolkien, Vance, Howard, and the other fantasists who came before me, A Game of Thrones and its sequels were also influenced by the works of great historical novelists like Thomas B. Costain, Mika Waltari, Howard Pyle … and Maurice Druon, the amazing French writer who gave us the The Accursed Kings, seven splendid novels that chronicle the downfall of the Capetian kings and the beginnings of the Hundred Years War.

Druon’s novels have not been easy to find, especially in English translation (and the seventh and final volume was never translated into English at all). The series has twice been made into a television series in France, and both versions are available on DVD … but only in French, undubbed, and without English subtitles. Very frustrating for English-speaking Druon fans like me.

The Accursed Kings has it all. Iron kings and strangled queens, battles and betrayals, lies and lust, deception, family rivalries, the curse of the Templars, babies switched at birth, she-wolves, sin, and swords, the doom of a great dynasty … and all of it (well, most of it) straight from the pages of history. And believe me, the Starks and the Lannisters have nothing on the Capets and Plantagenets.

Whether you’re a history buff or a fantasy fan, Druon’s epic will keep you turning pages. This was the original game of thrones. If you like A Song of Ice and Fire, you will love The Accursed Kings.

George R.R. Martin

The Characters in this Book

THE QUEEN OF FRANCE:

CLÉMENCE OF HUNGARY, grand-daughter of Charles II of Anjou-Sicily and of Marie of Hungary, second wife and widow of Louis X, the Hutin, King of France and Navarre, aged 23.

LOUIS X’S CHILDREN:

JEANNE OF NAVARRE, daughter of Louis X and his first wife, Marguerite of Burgundy, aged 5. JEAN I, called THE POSTHUMOUS, son of Louis X and Clémence of Hungary, King of France.

THE REGENT:

PHILIPPE, second son of Philip IV, the Fair, and brother to Louis X, Count of Poitiers, Peer of the Kingdom, Count Palatine of Burgundy, Lord of Salins, Regent, then Philippe V, the Long, aged 23.

HIS BROTHER:

CHARLES, third son of Philip the Fair, Count de La Marche and future King Charles IV, the Fair, aged 22.

HIS WIFE:

JEANNE OF BURGUNDY, daughter of Count Othon of Burgundy and of the Countess Mahaut of Artois, heiress to the County of Burgundy, aged 23.

HIS CHILDREN:

JEANNE, also called of Burgundy, aged 8.

MARGUERITE, aged 6.

ISABELLE, aged 5.

LOUIS-PHILIPPE of France.

THE VALOIS BRANCH:

MONSEIGNEUR CHARLES, son of Philippe III and of Isabella of Aragon, brother of Philip the Fair, Count of the Appanage of Valois, Count of Maine, Anjou, Alençon, Chartres, Perche, Peer of the Kingdom, ex-Titular Emperor of Constantinople, Count of Romagna, aged 46.

PHILIPPE OF VALOIS, son of the above and of Marguerite of Anjou-Sicily, the future King Philippe VI, aged 23.

THE EVREUX BRANCH:

MONSEIGNEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE, son of Philippe III and of Marie of Brabant, half-brother of Philip the Fair and of Charles of Valois, Count of Evreux and Etampes, aged 40.

PHILIPPE OF EVREUX, his son.

THE CLERMONT-BOURBON BRANCH:

ROBERT, COUNT OF CLERMONT, sixth son of Saint Louis, aged 60.

LOUIS OF BOURBON, son of the above.

THE ARTOIS BRANCH, DESCENDED FROM A BROTHER OF SAINT LOUIS:

THE COUNTESS MAHAUT OF ARTOIS, Peer of the Kingdom, widow of the Count Palatine Othon IV, mother of Jeanne and Blanche of Burgundy, mother-in-law of Philippe of Poitiers and of Charles de La Marche, aged about 45.

ROBERT III OF ARTOIS, nephew of the above, Count of Beaumont-le-Roger, Lord of Conches, aged 29.

THE DUCHY OF BURGUNDY FAMILY:

AGNÈS OF FRANCE, youngest daughter of Saint Louis, dowager Duchess of Burgundy, widow of Duke Robert II, mother of Marguerite of Burgundy, aged about 57.

EUDES V, her son, Duke of Burgundy, brother of Marguerite and uncle of Jeanne of Navarre, aged about 35.

THE COUNTS OF VIENNOIS:

THE DAUPHIN JEAN II de la Tour du Pin, brother-in-law of Queen Clémence.

THE DAUPHINIET GUIGUES, his son.

THE GREAT OFFICERS OF THE CROWN:

GAUCHER DE CHÂTILLON, Constable of France.

RAOUL DE PRESLES, jurist, one-time Councillor to Philip the Fair.

MILLE DE NOYERS, jurist, one-time Marshal of the Army, brother-in-law of the Constable.

HUGUES DE BOUVILLE, one-time Grand Chamberlain to Philip the Fair.

THE SENESCHAL DE JOINVILLE, companion-in-arms to Saint Louis, a chronicler.

ANSEAU DE JOINVILLE, son of the above, Councillor to the Regent.

ADAM HÉRON, Grand Chamberlain to the Regent.

COUNT JEAN DE FOREZ.

JEAN DE CORBEIL and JEAN DE BEAUMONT, called the Déramé, Marshals.

PIERRE DE GALARD, Grand Master of the Crossbowmen.

ROBERT DE GAMACHES and GUILLAUME DE SERIZ, Chamberlains.

GEOFFROY DE FLEURY, Bursar.

THE CARDINALS:

JACQUES DUÈZE, Cardinal in Curia, then Pope Jean XXII, aged 72.

FRANCESCO CAETANI, nephew of Pope Boniface VIII.

ARNAUD D’AUCH, Cardinal Camerlingo.

NAPOLÉON ORSINI, JACQUES and PIERRE COLONNA, BÉRENGER FRÉDOL, elder and younger brothers, ARNAUD DE PÉLAGRUE, STEFANESCHI, and MANDAGOUT, etc.

THE BARONS OF ARTOIS:

The Lords of VARENNES, SOUASTRE, CAUMONT, FIENNES, PICQUIGNY, KIÉREZ, HAUTPONLIEU, BEAUVAL, etc.

THE LOMBARDS:

SPINELLO TOLOMEI, a Siennese banker living in Paris.

GUCCIO BAGLIONI, his nephew, aged 20.

BOCCACCIO, a traveller, father of the poet Boccaccio.

THE CRESSAY FAMILY:

DAME ELIABEL, widow of the Lord of Cressay.

JEAN and PIERRE, her sons, aged 24 and 22 respectively.

MARIE, her daughter, aged 18.

ROBERT DE COURTENAY, Archbishop of Rheims.

GUILLAUME DE MELLO, Councillor to the Duke of Burgundy.

MESSIRE VARAY, Consul of Lyons.

GEOFFROY COQUATRIX, a Burgess of Paris, an army contractor.

MADAME DE BOUVILLE, wife of the one-time Chamberlain.

BÉATRICE D’HIRSON, niece of the Chancellor of Artois, Lady-in-Waiting to the Countess Mahaut.

All the above names have their place in history.

The Royal Succession

Queens wore white mourning.

The wimple of fine linen, enclosing her neck and imprisoning her chin to the lip, revealing only the centre of her face, was white; so was the great veil covering her forehead and eyebrows; so was the dress which, fastened at the wrists, reached to her feet. Queen Clémence of Hungary, widowed at twenty-three after ten months of marriage to King Louis X, had donned these almost conventual garments and would doubtless wear them for the rest of her life.

Prologue

IN THREE HUNDRED AND twenty-seven years, from the election of Hugues Capet to the death of Philip the Fair, only eleven Kings had reigned in France and each one had left a son to ascend the throne.

It was a prodigious dynasty, which Providence seemed to have marked out for duration and permanence. Only two of the eleven reigns had covered less than fifteen years.

This singular continuity in the exercise and transmission of power had allowed, if not determined, the formation of national unity.

For the feudal link, a purely personal one between vassal and suzerain, between the weaker and the stronger, was substituted gradually another relationship, another compact uniting the members of a vast human community which had for long been subject to similar vicissitudes and an identical law.

If the concept of the nation had not yet become evident, its symbol already existed in the person of the sovereign, the supreme source of authority and the ultimate court of appeal. Whoever thought of the King also thought of France.

And Philip the Fair, throughout his life, had set himself to cement this nascent unity with a powerful centralized administration and the systematic destruction of external and internal rivalry.

Hardly had the Iron King died, when his son, Louis X, followed him to the grave. The population could not help but see in these two deaths, kings struck down in their prime, one following so quickly on the other, the finger of fate.

Louis X, the Hutin, had reigned eighteen months, six days and ten hours. During this short period of time, this pitiful monarch had destroyed the greater part of his father’s achievement. His reign had seen the murder of his Queen and the hanging of his first minister; famine had ravaged France; two provinces had rebelled; and an army had been engulfed in the Flanders mud. The great nobles were infringing on the royal prerogatives once more; reaction was all-powerful; and the Treasury empty.

Louis X had ascended the throne at a moment when the world lacked a Pope; he died before a Pontiff had been elected, and Christendom trembled on the verge of schism.

And now France was without a king.

For Louis X, by his marriage to Marguerite of Burgundy, had left only a daughter of five years of age, Jeanne of Navarre, who was suspected strongly of bastardy. By his second marriage, he had bequeathed but an expectation: Queen Clémence was pregnant; but would not be brought to bed for five months. Moreover, it was being canvassed openly that the Hutin had been poisoned.

No disposition had been made for a regency; and personal ambitions resulted in individual attempts to seize power. In Paris the Count of Valois endeavoured to have himself proclaimed Regent. At Dijon the Duke of Burgundy, brother of the murdered Marguerite and the powerful head of a baronial league, undertook to avenge the memory of his sister by championing the rights of his niece. At Lyons the Count of Poitiers, elder surviving brother of the Hutin, was grappling with the intrigues of the Cardinals and vainly striving to force the Conclave to a decision. The Flemings were but awaiting the occasion to take up arms again; while the nobility of Artois was pertinaciously conducting a civil war.

All this was enough to remind the people of the curse pronounced two years before by the Grand Master of the Templars from among the faggots of his pyre. In that age of superstition, it might well have seemed, in the first week of June 1316, that the Capets were an accursed race.

PART ONE

1
The White Queen

QUEENS WORE white mourning.

The wimple of fine linen, enclosing her neck and imprisoning her chin to the lip, revealing only the centre of her face, was white; so was the great veil covering her forehead and eyebrows; so was the dress which, fastened at the wrists, reached to her feet. Queen Clémence of Hungary, widowed at twenty-three after ten months of marriage to King Louis X, had donned these almost conventual garments and would doubtless wear them for the rest of her life.

Henceforth no one would look on her wonderful golden hair, on the perfect oval of her face, and on the calm, lustrous splendour which had struck all beholders and made her beauty famous.

The narrow and pathetic mask, framed in its immaculate linen, bore the marks of sleepless nights and days of weeping. Even her gaze had altered, never coming to rest but seeming to flutter across the surface of people and of things. The lovely Queen Clémence already looked like the effigy on her tomb.

Nevertheless, beneath the folds of her dress, a new life was forming: Clémence was pregnant; and she was obsessed by the thought that her husband would never know his child.

‘If only Louis had lived long enough to see his child born!’ she thought. ‘Five months, only five months longer! How happy he would have been, particularly if it is a son. If I had only become pregnant on our wedding night!’

The Queen turned wearily to look at the Count of Valois, who was strutting up and down the room like a cock on a dunghill.

‘But why, Uncle, why should anyone have been so wicked as to poison him?’ she asked. ‘Did he not do all the good in his power? Why are you always searching for the wickedness of man where, doubtless, there is but a manifestation of the Divine Will?’

‘You are on this occasion alone in rendering to God that which seems rather to belong to the machinations of the Devil,’ replied Charles of Valois.

The great crest of his hood falling on his shoulder, his nose strong, his cheeks bloated and high of colour, his stomach thrust well to the fore, dressed in the same suit of black velvet with silver clasps which he had worn eighteen months earlier at the funeral of his brother Philip the Fair, Monseigneur of Valois had just returned from Saint-Denis, where he had been burying his nephew, Louis X. The ceremony had created a problem or two for him, because, for the first time since the ritual of royal burials had been established, the officers of the household, having cried: ‘The King is dead!’ had been unable to add: ‘Long live the King!’; and no one knew before whom the various rites, normally appropriate to the new sovereign, should be performed.

‘Very well! Break your wand before me,’ Valois had said to the Grand Chamberlain, Mathieu de Trye. ‘I am the eldest of the family and take precedence.’

But his half-brother, the Count of Evreux, had taken exception to this peculiar innovation, for Charles of Valois would certainly have taken advantage of it as an argument for his being recognized as Regent.

‘The eldest of the family, if you mean it in that sense,’ the Count of Evreux had said, ‘is not you, Charles. Our Uncle Robert of Clermont is the son of Saint Louis. Have you forgotten that he is still alive?’

‘You know very well that poor Robert is mad and that his clouded mind cannot be relied on in anything,’ Valois had replied, shrugging his shoulders.

In the end, after the funeral feast, which had been held in the abbey, the Grand Chamberlain had broken the insignia of his office before an empty chair.

‘Did not Louis give alms to the poor? Did he not pardon many prisoners?’ Clémence went on, as if she were trying to convince herself. ‘He had a generous heart, I assure you. If he sinned, he repented.’

It was clearly not the moment to contest the virtues with which the Queen embellished the recent memory of her husband. Nevertheless, Charles of Valois found it impossible to control an outburst of ill-humour.

‘I know, Niece, I know,’ he replied, ‘that you had a most pious influence on him, and that he was extremely generous … to you. But one cannot rule by Paternosters alone, nor by heaping presents on those one loves. Repentance is not enough to disarm the hatreds one has sown.’

‘So now,’ Clémence thought, ‘Charles, who laid a claim to power while Louis was alive, is denying him already. And soon I shall be reproached with all the presents he gave me. I have become the foreigner.’

She was too weak, too overcome to find the strength for indignation. She merely said: ‘I cannot believe that Louis was so hated that anyone would wish to kill him.’

‘All right, don’t believe it, Niece,’ cried Valois; ‘but it’s the fact! There’s the proof of the dog that licked the linen used for removing the entrails during the embalming and died an hour later. There’s …’

Clémence closed her eyes and clutched the arms of her chair in order not to reel at the vision it conjured up in her mind. How could anyone speak so cruelly of her husband, the King who had slept beside her, the father of the child she carried, compelling her to imagine the corpse beneath the knives of the embalmers?

Monseigneur of Valois continued to develop his macabre thesis. When would he stop talking, that fat, restless, vain authoritarian who, dressed sometimes in blue, sometimes in red, sometimes in black, had appeared at every important or tragic hour in Clémence’s life during the ten months she had been in France, to lecture her, deafen her with words and compel her to act against her will? Even on the morning of her marriage at Saint-Lyé, Uncle Valois, whom Clémence had scarcely ever seen, had almost spoiled the ceremony by instructing her in court intrigues of which she understood nothing. Clémence remembered Louis coming to meet her on the Troyes road, the country church, the room in the little castle, so hastily furnished as a nuptial chamber. ‘Did I realize my happiness? No, I must not weep in front of him,’ she thought.

‘Who the author of this appalling crime may be,’ went on Valois, ‘we do not yet know; but we shall discover him, Niece, I give you my solemn promise. If I am given the necessary powers, that is. We kings …’

Valois never lost an opportunity of reminding people of the fact that he had worn two crowns, which, though they were purely nominal, still put him on an equal footing with sovereign princes.1, fn1

‘We kings have enemies who are less hostile to our persons than to the decisions of our power; and there are many people who might have an interest in making you a widow. There are the Templars, whose Order, as I said at the time, it was a great mistake to suppress. They formed a secret conspiracy and swore to kill my brother and his sons. My brother is dead, his eldest son has followed him. There are the Roman Cardinals. Do you remember Cardinal Caetani’s attempt to cast a spell on Louis and your brother-in-law of Poitiers, both of whom he wished to destroy? The attempt was discovered, but Caetani may well have struck by other means. What do you expect? One cannot remove the Pope from the throne of Saint Peter, as my brother did, without arousing resentment. It is also possible that supporters of the Duke of Burgundy may still feel bitter about Marguerite’s punishment, to say nothing of the fact that you replaced her.’

Clémence looked Charles of Valois straight in the eye, which embarrassed him and made him flush a little. He had had some hand in Marguerite’s murder. He now realized that Clémence knew it; through Louis’s rash confidences no doubt.

But Clémence said nothing; it was a subject she was chary of broaching. She felt that she was involuntarily to blame. For her husband, whose virtues she boasted, had nevertheless had his first wife strangled so that he might marry her, Clémence, the niece of the King of Naples. Need one look further for the cause of God’s punishment?

‘And then there is your neighbour, the Countess Mahaut,’ Valois hurried on, ‘who is not the woman to shrink from crime, even the worst …’

‘How does she differ from you?’ thought Clémence, not daring to reply. ‘Nobody seems to shrink much from killing at this Court.’

‘And less than a month ago, to compel her to submit, Louis confiscated her county of Artois.’

For a moment Clémence wondered if Valois were not inventing all these possible culprits in order to conceal the fact that he was himself the author of the crime. But she was immediately horror-struck at the thought, for which there was indeed no possible basis. No, she refused to suspect anyone; she wanted Louis to have died a natural death. Nevertheless, Clémence gazed unconsciously out of the open window towards the south where, beyond the trees of the Forest of Vincennes, lay the Château of Conflans, Countess Mahaut’s summer residence. A few days before Louis’s death, Mahaut, accompanied by her daughter, the Countess of Poitiers, had paid Clémence a visit: an extremely polite visit. Clémence had not left them alone for a single instant. They had admired the tapestries in her room.

‘Nothing is more degrading than to imagine that there is a criminal among the people about one,’ thought Clémence, ‘and to start looking for treason in every face.’

‘That is why, my dear Niece,’ went on Valois, ‘you must return to Paris as I asked you. You know how fond of you I am. I arranged your marriage. Your father was my brother-in-law. Listen to me as you would have listened to him, had God spared him. The hand that struck down Louis may intend pursuing its vengeance on you and on the child you carry. I cannot leave you here, in the middle of the forest, at the mercy of the machinations of the wicked, and I shall be easy only when you are living close to me.’

For the last hour Valois had been trying to persuade Clémence to return to the Palace of the Cité, because he had decided to go there himself. It formed part of his plan for assuming the regency and facing the Council of Peers with the accomplished fact. Whoever was master in the Palace had the trappings of power. But to install himself there on his own might look as if he were usurping it by force. If, on the other hand, he entered the Cité in his niece’s wake, as her nearest relative and protector, no one could oppose it. The Queen’s condition was, at this moment, the best pledge of respect and the most effective instrument of government.

Clémence turned her head, as if to ask for help, towards a third person who was standing silently a few paces from her, his hands crossed on the hilt of a long sword, as he listened to the conversation.

‘Bouville, what should I do?’ she murmured.

Hugues de Bouville, ex-Grand Chamberlain to Philip the Fair, had been appointed Curator of the Stomach by the first Council which had followed on the death of the Hutin. This good man, now growing stout and grey, but still extremely alert, who had been an exemplary royal servant for thirty years, took his new duties most seriously, if not tragically. He had formed a corps of carefully picked gentlemen, who mounted guard in detachments of twenty-four over the Queen’s door. He himself had donned his armour and, in the heat of June, large drops of sweat were running down under his coat of mail. The walls, the courtyards, indeed the whole perimeter of Vincennes, were stuffed with archers. Every kitchen-hand was constantly escorted by a sergeant-at-arms. Even the ladies-in-waiting were searched before entering the royal apartments. Never had a human life been guarded so closely as that which slumbered in the womb of the Queen of France.

In theory Bouville shared his duties with the old Sire de Joinville, who had been appointed Second Curator; the latter had been selected because he happened to be in Paris where he had come to draw, as he did twice a year, with the fussy punctuality of an old man, the income from the endowments conferred on him in three successive reigns, and in particular when Saint Louis was canonized. But the Hereditary Seneschal of Champagne was now ninety-two years old; he was practically the doyen of the high French nobility. He was half-blind and this last journey from his Château de Wassy in the Haute-Marne had tired him out. He spent most of his time dozing in the company of his two white-bearded equerries, so that all the duties had to be performed by Bouville alone.

For Queen Clémence, Bouville was linked with all her happiest memories. He had been the ambassador who had come to ask her hand in marriage and had escorted her from Naples; he was her utterly devoted confidant and probably the only true friend she had at the French Court. Bouville had perfectly understood that Clémence did not wish to leave Vincennes.

‘Monseigneur,’ he said to Valois, ‘I can better assure the safety of the Queen in this manor with its close, surrounding walls than in the great Palace of the Cité, open to all comers. And if you are worried about the Countess Mahaut being near, I can inform you, for I am kept in touch with everything that goes on in the neighbourhood, that Madame Mahaut’s wagons are at this moment being loaded for Paris.’

Valois was considerably annoyed by the air of importance Bouville had assumed since he had become Curator, and by his insistence on remaining there, stuck to his sword, by the Queen’s side.

‘Monsieur Hugues,’ he said haughtily, ‘your duty is to watch over the stomach, not to decide where the royal family shall reside, nor to defend the whole kingdom on your own.’

Not in the least perturbed, Bouville replied: ‘I must also remind you, Monseigneur, that the Queen cannot appear in public until forty days have elapsed since her bereavement.’

‘I know the custom as well as you do, my good man! Who said that the Queen would show herself in public? She shall travel in a closed coach. Really, Niece,’ Valois cried, turning to Clémence, ‘anyone would think that I was trying to send you to the country of the Great Khan, and that Vincennes was two thousand leagues from Paris!’

‘You must understand, Uncle,’ Clémence replied weakly, ‘that living at Vincennes is my last gift from Louis. He gave me this house, in there, and you were present’ – she fluttered her hand towards the room in which Louis X had died – ‘that I might live in it. It seems to me that he has not really departed. You must understand that it’s here that we had …’

But Monseigneur of Valois could not understand the claims of memory or the imaginings of sorrow.

‘Your husband, for whom we pray, my dear Niece, belongs henceforth to the kingdom’s past. But you carry its future. By exposing your life, you expose that of your child. Louis, who sees you from on high, would never forgive you.’

The shot went home, and Clémence sank back in her chair without another word.

But Bouville declared that he could decide nothing without the agreement of the Sire de Joinville, and sent someone to look for him. They waited several minutes. Then the door opened, and they waited again. At last, dressed in a long robe such as had been worn at the time of the Crusade, trembling in every limb, his skin mottled and like the bark of a tree, his eyes with their faded irises watering, Saint Louis’s last companion-at-arms entered, dragging his feet, supported by his equerries, who tottered almost as much as he did. He was given a seat with all the respect to which he was entitled, and Valois began to explain his intentions about the Queen. The old man listened, solemnly nodding his head, obviously delighted still to have some part to play. When Valois had finished, the Seneschal fell into a meditation they were careful not to disturb; they waited for the oracle to speak. Suddenly he asked: ‘But where is the King then?’

Valois looked crestfallen. So much useless trouble, and when time pressed! Did the Seneschal still understand what was said to him?

‘But the King is dead, Messire de Joinville,’ he replied, ‘and we buried him this morning. You know that you have been appointed Curator.’

The Seneschal frowned and seemed to be making a great effort to recollect. Indeed, failure of memory was no new thing with him; when he was nearly eighty and dictating his famous Memoirs, he had not realized that towards the end of the second part he was repeating almost word for word what he had already said in the first.

‘Yes, our young Sire Louis,’ he said at last. ‘He is dead. It was to himself that I presented my great book. Do you know that this is the fourth king I have seen die?’

He announced this as if it were an exploit in itself.

‘Then, if the King is dead, the Queen is Regent,’ he declared.

Monseigneur of Valois turned purple in the face. He had had appointed as Curators a senile idiot and a mediocrity, believing he could manage them as he wished; but he was hoist with his own petard, for it was they who were creating his worst difficulties.

‘The Queen is not Regent, Messire Seneschal; she is pregnant,’ he cried. ‘She cannot in any circumstances be Regent until it is known whether she will give birth to a king! Look at her condition, see if she is in a fit state to carry out the duties of the kingdom!’

‘You know that I see very little,’ replied the old man.

With her hand to her forehead, Clémence merely thought: ‘When will they stop? When will they leave me in peace?’

Joinville began explaining in what circumstances, after the death of King Louis VIII, Queen Blanche of Castile had assumed the regency, to the satisfaction of all.

‘Madame Blanche of Castile, and this was only whispered, was not as pure as the image that has been created of her. It appears that Count Thibaut of Champagne, who was a good friend of Messire my father’s, served her even in her bed …’

They had to let him talk. Though the Seneschal easily forgot what had happened the day before, he had a precise memory for the things he had been told as a small child. He had found an audience and was making the most of it. His hands, shaking with a senile trembling, clawed unceasingly at the silk of his robe over his knees.

‘And even when our sainted King left for the Crusade, where I was with him …’

‘The Queen resided in Paris during that time, did she not?’ interjected Charles of Valois.

‘Yes, yes …’ said the Seneschal.

Clémence was the first to give way.

‘Very well, Uncle, so be it!’ she said. ‘I will do as you wish and return to the Cité.’

‘Ah! A wise decision at last, which I am sure Messire de Joinville approves.’

‘Yes, yes …’

‘I shall go and take the necessary measures. Your escort will be under the command of my son, Philippe, and our cousin, Robert of Artois.’

‘Thank you, Uncle, thank you,’ said Clémence, on the verge of collapse. ‘But now, I ask you, please, let me pray.’

An hour later, the Count of Valois’s orders had set the Château of Vincennes in turmoil. Wagons were being brought out of the coach-house; whips were cracking on the cruppers of the great Percheron horses; servants were running to and fro; the archers had laid down their weapons to lend a hand to the stablemen. Since the King’s death they had all felt they should talk in low voices, but now everyone found an occasion to shout; and, if anyone had really wished to make an attempt on the Queen’s life, this would have been the very moment to choose.

Within the manor the upholsterers were taking down the hangings, removing the furniture, carrying out tables, dressers and chests. The officers of the Queen’s household and the ladies-in-waiting were busy packing. There was to be a first convoy of twenty vehicles, and doubtless they would have to make two journeys to complete the move.

Clémence of Hungary, in the long white robe to which she was not yet accustomed, went from room to room, escorted always by Bouville. There were dust, sweat and tumult everywhere, and that sense of pillage that goes with moving house. The Bursar, inventory in hand, was superintending the dispatch of the plate and valuables which had been collected together and now covered the whole floor of a room: dishes, ewers, the dozen silver-gilt goblets Louis had had made for Clémence, the great gold reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross, which was so heavy that the man carrying it staggered as if he were on his way to Calvary.

In the Queen’s chamber the first linen-maid, Eudeline, who had been the mistress of Louis X before his marriage to Marguerite, was in charge of packing the clothes.

‘What is the use of taking all these dresses, since they will never be of any use to me again?’ said Clémence.

And the jewels too, packed in heavy iron chests, the brooches, rings and precious stones Louis had lavished on her during the brief period of their marriage, were all henceforth useless objects. Even the three crowns, laden with emeralds, rubies and pearls, were too high and too ornate for a widow to wear. A simple circlet of gold with short lilies, placed over her veil, would be the only jewel to which she would ever have a right.

‘I have become a white Queen, as I saw my grandmother, Marie of Hungary, become,’ she thought. ‘But my grandmother was over sixty and had borne thirteen children. My husband will never even see his.’

‘Madame,’ asked Eudeline, ‘am I to come with you to the Palace? No one has given me orders.’

Clémence looked at the beautiful, fair woman who, forgetting all jealousy, had been of such great help to her during the last months and particularly during Louis’s illness. ‘He had a child by her, and he banished her, shut her up in a nunnery. Is that why Heaven has punished us?’ She felt laden with all the sins Louis had committed before he knew her, and that she was destined to redeem them by her suffering. She would have her whole life in which to pay God, with her tears, her prayers and her charity, the heavy price for Louis’s soul.

‘No,’ she murmured, ‘no, Eudeline, don’t come with me. Someone who loved him must remain here.’

Then, dismissing even Bouville, she took refuge in the only quiet room, the only room left undisturbed, the chamber in which her husband had died.

It was dark behind the drawn curtains. Clémence went and knelt by the bed, placing her lips against the brocade coverlet.

Suddenly she heard a nail scratching against cloth. She felt a terror which proved to her that she still had a will to live. For a moment she remained still, holding her breath, while the scratching went on behind her. Warily she turned her head. It was the Seneschal de Joinville, who had been put in a corner of the room to wait till it was time to leave.

2
The Cardinal who Did not Believe in Hell

THE JUNE NIGHT WAS beginning to grow pale; already in the east a thin grey streak low in the sky was the harbinger of the sun, soon to rise over the city of Lyons.

It was the hour when the wagons set out for the city, bringing fruit and vegetables from the neighbouring countryside; the hour when the owls fell silent and the sparrows had not yet begun to twitter. It was also the hour when Cardinal Jacques Duèze, behind the narrow windows of one of the apartments of honour in the Abbey of Ainay, thought about death.

The Cardinal had never had much need of sleep; and as he grew older he needed still less. Three hours of sleep were quite enough. A little after midnight he rose and sat at his desk. A man of quick intellect and prodigious knowledge, trained in all the intellectual disciplines, he had composed treatises on theology, law, medicine and alchemy which carried weight among the scholars and savants of his time.

In this period, when the great hope of poor and princes alike was the manufacture of gold, Duèze’s doctrines on the elixirs for the transmutation of metals were much referred to.

‘The materials from which elixirs can be made are three,’ could be read in his work entitled The Philosophers’ Elixir, ‘the seven metals, the seven spirits and other things … The seven metals are sun, moon, copper, tin, lead, iron, and quicksilver; the seven spirits are quicksilver, sulphur, sal-ammoniac, orpiment, tutty, magnesia, marcasite; and the other things are quicksilver, human blood, horses’s blood and urine, and human urine.’²

At seventy-two the Cardinal was still finding fields in which he had not given his thought expression, and was completing his work while others slept. He used as many candles as a whole community of monks.

During the nights he also worked at the huge correspondence which he maintained with numerous prelates, abbots, jurists, scholars, chancellors and sovereign princes all over Europe. His secretary and his copyists found their whole day’s work ready for them in the morning.

Or again, he might consider the horoscope of one of his rivals in the Conclave, comparing it to his own sky, and asking the planets whether he would don the tiara. According to the stars, his greatest chance of becoming Pope was between the beginning of August and the beginning of September of the present year. And now it was already the 10th of June and nothing seemed to be shaping to that end.

Then came that painful moment before the dawn. As if he had a premonition that he would leave the world precisely at that hour, the Cardinal felt a sort of diffused distress, a vague unease both of body and of mind. In his fatigue he questioned his past actions. His memories were of an extraordinary destiny. A member of a family of burgesses of Cahors, and still completely unknown at an age at which most men in those times had already made their career, his life seemed to have begun only at forty-four, when he had left suddenly for Naples in the company of an uncle, who was going there on business. The voyage, being away from home, the discovery of Italy, had had a curious effect on him. A few days after landing, he had become the pupil of the tutor to the royal children and had thrown himself into abstract study with a passion, a frenzy, a quickness of comprehension and a precision of memory which the most intelligent adolescent might have envied. He was no more subject to hunger than he was to the need for sleep. A piece of bread had often sufficed him for a whole day, and prison life would have been perfectly agreeable to him provided he had been furnished with books. He had soon become a doctor of canon law, then a doctor of civil law, and his name had begun to be known. The Court of Naples sought the advice of the cleric from Cahors.

This thirst for knowledge was succeeded by a thirst for power. Councillor to King Charles II of Anjou-Sicily (the grandfather of Queen Clémence), then Secretary to the Secret Councils and the holder of numerous ecclesiastical benefices, he had been appointed Bishop of Fréjus ten years after his arrival, and a little later succeeded to the post of Chancellor of the kingdom of Naples, that is to say, first minister of a state which included both southern Italy and the whole county of Provence.

So fabulous a rise among the intrigues of courts had not been accomplished merely with the talents of a jurist or a theologian. An event known to but few people, since it was a secret of the Church, shows the cunning and impudence of which Duèze was capable.

A few months after the death of Charles II he had been sent on a mission to the Papal Court, at a time when the bishopric of Avignon – the most important in Christendom because it was the seat of the Holy See – happened to be vacant. Still Chancellor, and therefore the repository of the seals, he disingenuously wrote a letter in which the new King of Naples, Robert, asked for the episcopate of Avignon for Jacques Duèze. This he did in 1310. Clement V, anxious to acquire the support of Naples at a time when his relations with Philip the Fair were somewhat uneasy, had immediately acceded to the request. The fraud was discovered only when Pope Clement and King Robert met with mutual surprise, the first because he had received no thanks for so great a favour, the second because he considered the unexpected appointment, which deprived him of his Chancellor, somewhat cavalier. But it was too late. Rather than create useless scandal, King Robert turned a blind eye, preferring to keep a hold over a man who was to occupy one of the highest of ecclesiastical positions. Each had done well out of it. And now Duèze was Cardinal in Curia, and his works were studied in every university.

Yet, however astonishing his career might be, it appeared so only to those who looked on it from the outside. Days lived, whether full or empty, whether busy or serene, are but days gone by, and the ashes of the past weigh the same in every hand.

Had so much activity, ambition and expended energy any meaning, when it must all inevitably end in that Beyond of which the greatest intellects and the most abstruse of human sciences could glimpse no more than indecipherable fragments? Why should he wish to become Pope? Would it not have been wiser to retire to a cloister in detachment from the world; lay aside the pride of knowledge and the vanity of power; and acquire the humility of simple faith in order to prepare himself for death? But even meditating thus, Cardinal Duèze turned perforce to abstract speculation; and his concern with death became transformed into a juridical argument with the Deity.

‘The doctors assure us,’ he thought that morning, ‘that the souls of the just, immediately after death, enjoy the beatific vision of God, which is their recompense. So be it, so be it. But after the end of the world, when the bodies of the dead have risen again to rejoin their souls, we are to be judged at the Last Judgment. Yet God, who is perfect, cannot sit in appeal on His own judgments. God cannot commit a mistake and be thereby compelled to cast out of Paradise the elect He has admitted already. Moreover, would it not be proper for the soul to enter into possession of the joy of the Lord only at the moment when, reunited with its body, it is itself in its nature perfect? Therefore the doctors must be wrong. Therefore there cannot be either beatitude, as such, nor the beatific vision before the end of time, and God will permit Himself to be looked on only after the Last Judgment. But, till then, where are the souls of the dead? Do we wait perhaps sub altare Dei, beneath that altar of God of which Saint John the Divine speaks in his Apocalypse?’

The noise of horses’ hooves, a most unusual sound at that hour, echoed along the abbey walls and across the little round cobbles with which the best streets in Lyons were paved. The Cardinal listened for a moment, then relapsed into the reasoning whose consequences were indeed surprising.

‘For if Paradise is empty,’ he said to himself, ‘it creates a singular modification in the condition of those whom we decree to be saints or blessed. And what is true for the souls of the just must necessarily be true also for the souls of the unjust. God could not punish the wicked before He has recompensed the just. The labourer receives his hire at the end of the day; and it must be at the end of the world that the wheat will be separated finally from the tares. There can be no soul at this moment living in Hell, since sentence has not yet been pronounced. And that is as much as to say that Hell, till then, does not exist.’

This proposition was peculiarly reassuring to someone thinking of death; it postponed the date of the supreme trial without destroying the prospect of eternal life, and was more or less in keeping with the intuition, common to the greater part of men, that death is a falling into a dark and immense silence, into an indefinite unconsciousness.

Clearly such a doctrine, if it were to be openly professed, could not fail to arouse violent attack both among the doctors of the Church and among the pious populace, and the moment was ill-chosen for a candidate to the Holy See to preach the inexistence of both Heaven and Hell, or their emptiness.³

‘We shall have to await the end of the Conclave,’ the Cardinal thought. He was interrupted by a monk in attendance who knocked on his door and announced the arrival of a courier from Paris.

‘Whom does he come from?’ asked the Cardinal.

Duèze had a smothered, strangled, utterly toneless voice, though it was perfectly distinct.

‘From the Count de Bouville,’ replied the monk. ‘He must have ridden fast, for he looks very tired; when I went to open to him, I found him half-asleep, his forehead against the door.’

‘Bring him to me at once.’

And the Cardinal, who had been meditating a few minutes before on the vanity of the ambitions of this world, immediately thought: ‘Can it be on the subject of the election? Is the Court of France openly supporting my candidature? Is someone going to offer me a bargain?’

He felt excited, full of hope and curiosity; he walked up and down the room with little, rapid steps. Duèze was no taller than a boy of fifteen, and had a mouse-like face beneath thick white eyebrows and fragile bones.

Beyond the windows the sky was beginning to turn pink; it was already dawn but not yet light enough to snuff the candles. His bad hour was over.

The courier entered; at first glance, the Cardinal knew that this was no usual courier. In the first place, a professional would immediately have gone down on his knee and handed over his message-box, instead of remaining on his feet, bowing and saying, ‘Monseigneur …’ Besides, the Court of France sent its messages by strong, solidly built horsemen, well inured to hardship, such as big Robin-Cuisse-Maria, who often made the journey between Paris and Avignon, and not a stripling with a pointed nose, who seemed hardly able to keep his eyes open and reeled in his boots from fatigue.

‘It looks very like a disguise,’ Duèze thought. ‘And what’s more, I’ve seen that face somewhere before.’

He broke the seals of the letter with his thin short hands and was at once disappointed. It did not concern the election. It was merely a plea for protection for the messenger. Nevertheless, he saw a favourable sign in this; when Paris desired some service from the ecclesiastical authorities, they now looked to him.

‘Allora, lei è il signore Guccio Baglioni?’fn1 he said, when he had finished reading.

The young man started to hear himself addressed in Italian.

‘Si, Monsignore.’

‘The Count de Bouville recommends you to me that I may take you under my protection and conceal you from the enemies who are searching for you.’

‘If you will do me that favour, Monseigneur.’

‘It appears that you have had an unfortunate adventure which has compelled you to fly in that livery,’ went on the Cardinal in his rapid, toneless voice. ‘Tell me about it. Bouville says that you formed part of his escort when he brought Queen Clémence to France. Indeed, I remember now. I saw you with him. And you are the nephew of Messire Tolomei, the Captain-General of the Lombards of Paris. Excellent, excellent! Tell me your troubles.’

He had sat down and was toying mechanically with a revolving reading-desk on which were a number of the books he used in his work. He now felt calm and relaxed, ready to distract his mind with other people’s little problems.

Guccio Baglioni had ridden three hundred miles in less than four days. He could no longer feel his limbs; there was a thick fog in his head and he would have given anything in the world to stretch himself out on the floor and sleep and sleep.

He managed to master himself; his safety, his love and his future all made it necessary that he should control his fatigue for a little longer.

‘Well, Monseigneur, I married a daughter of the nobility,’ he replied.

It seemed to him that these words had issued from another’s lips. They were not those he would have wished to utter. He would have liked to explain to the Cardinal that an unparalleled disaster had overtaken him, that he was the most crushed and harrowed of men, that his life was threatened, that he had been separated, perhaps for ever, from the one woman without whom he could not live, that this woman was to be shut up in a convent, that events had befallen them during the last two weeks with such sudden violence that time seemed to have lost its normal dimensions, and that he felt he was hardly still living in the world he knew. And yet his whole tragedy, when it had to be put into words, was reduced to the single phrase: ‘Monseigneur, I married a daughter of the nobility.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Cardinal, ‘and what is her name?’

‘Marie de Cressay.’

‘Oh, Cressay; I don’t know it.’

‘But I had to marry her secretly, Monseigneur; her family were opposed to it.’

‘Because you’re a Lombard? Naturally; they’re still rather old-fashioned in France. In Italy, of course … So you wish to obtain an annulment? Well … if the marriage was secret …’

‘No, Monseigneur, I love her and she loves me,’ said Guccio. ‘But her family has discovered that she is with child, and her brothers have pursued me to try and kill me.’

‘They may do so, they have a customary right to do so. You have put yourself in the position of a ravisher. Who married you?’

‘Father Vicenzo.’

‘Fra Vicenzo? I don’t know him.’

‘The worst of it is, Monseigneur, that the priest is dead. So I can never prove that we are really married. But don’t think I’m a coward, Monseigneur; I wanted to fight. But my uncle went and asked the advice of Messire de Bouville …’

‘… who wisely advised you to go away for a time.’

‘But Marie is going to be shut up in a convent! Do you think, Monseigneur, that you will be able to get her out? Do you think I shall ever see her again?’

‘One thing at a time, my dear son,’ replied the Cardinal, still revolving his reading-desk. ‘A convent? What better place could she be in at the moment? You must trust in God’s infinite mercy, of which we all stand in such great need.’

Guccio lowered his head with an exhausted air. His black hair was covered with dust.

‘Has your uncle good commercial relations with the Bardi?’ went on the Cardinal.

‘Indeed yes, Monseigneur. The Bardi are your bankers, I believe,’ replied Guccio with automatic politeness.

‘Yes, they are my bankers. But I find them less easy to deal with these days than they were in the past. They’ve become such an enormous concern! They have branches everywhere. And they have to refer to Florence for the smallest demand. They’re as slow as an Ecclesiastical Court. Has your uncle many prelates among his customers?’

Guccio’s cares were far removed from the bank. The fog was growing thicker in his head; his eyelids were burning.

‘We have mostly the great barons,’ he said, ‘the Count of Valois, the Count of Artois. We should be greatly honoured, Monseigneur …’

‘We’ll talk of that later. For the moment you’re in the shelter of this monastery. You will pass for a man in my employ; perhaps we’ll make you wear a clerk’s robe. I’ll talk to my chaplain about it. You can take off that livery and go and sleep in peace; that appears to be what you need the most.’

Guccio bowed, muttered a few words of gratitude and went to the door. Then, coming to a halt, he said: ‘I can’t undress yet, Monseigneur; I’ve got another message to deliver.’

‘To whom?’ asked Duèze somewhat suspiciously.

‘To the Count of Poitiers.’

‘Give me the letter; I’ll send it later by one of the brothers.’

‘But, Monseigneur, Messire de Bouville was very insistent …’

‘Do you know if the message concerns the Conclave?’

‘Oh, no, Monseigneur! It’s about the King’s death.’

The Cardinal leapt from his chair.

‘King Louis is dead? But why didn’t you say so at once?’

‘Isn’t it known here? I thought you would have been informed, Monseigneur.’

In fact, he wasn’t thinking at all. His misfortunes and his fatigue had made him forget this capital event. He had galloped all the way from Paris, changing horses in the monasteries whose names he had been given, eating hastily and talking as little as possible. Without knowing it, he had forestalled the official couriers.

‘What did he die of?’

‘That’s precisely what Messire de Bouville wants to tell the Count of Poitiers.’

‘Murder?’ whispered Duèze.

‘It seems the King was poisoned.’

The Cardinal thought for a moment.

‘That may alter many things,’ he murmured. ‘Has a regent been appointed?’

‘I don’t know, Monseigneur. When I left, everyone was talking of the Count of Valois.’

‘All right, my dear son, go and rest.’

‘But, Monseigneur, what about the Count of Poitiers?’

The prelate’s thin lips sketched a rapid smile, which might have passed for an expression of goodwill.

‘It would not be prudent for you to show yourself; moreover, you’re dropping with fatigue,’ he said. ‘Give me the letter; and so that no one can reproach you, I’ll give it him myself.’

A few minutes later, preceded by a linkman, as his dignity required, and followed by a secretary, the Cardinal in Curia left the Abbey of Ainay, between the Rhône and the Saône, and went out into the dark alleys, which were often made narrower still by heaps of filth. Thin and slight, he seemed to skip along, almost running in spite of his seventy-two years. His purple robe appeared to dance between the walls.

The bells of the twenty churches and forty-two monasteries of Lyons rang for the first office. Distances were short in this city, which numbered barely twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom half were engaged in the commerce of religion and the other half in the religion of commerce. The Cardinal soon reached the house of the Consul, where lodged the Count of Poitiers.

3
The Gates of Lyons

THE COUNT OF POITIERS was just finishing dressing when his chamberlain announced the Cardinal’s visit.

Very tall, very thin, with a prominent nose, his hair lying across his forehead in short locks and falling in curls about his cheeks, his skin fresh as it may be at twenty-three, the young Prince, clothed in a dressing-gown of shot camocas, greeted Monseigneur Duèze, kissing his ring with deference.

It would have been difficult to find a greater contrast, a more ironical dissimilarity than between these two figures, one like a ferret just emerged from its earth, the other like a heron stalking haughtily across the marshes.

‘In spite of the early hour, Monseigneur,’ said the Cardinal, ‘I did not wish to defer bringing you my prayers in the loss you have suffered.’

‘The loss?’ said Philippe of Poitiers with a slight start.

His first thought was for his wife, Jeanne, whom he had left in Paris and who had been pregnant for eight months.

‘I see that I have done well to come and tell you,’ went on Duèze. ‘The King, your brother, died five days ago.’

Philippe stood perfectly still; his chest barely moved as he drew a deep breath. His face was expressionless, showing no surprise or emotion – or even impatience for further details.

‘I am grateful to you for your alacrity, Monseigneur,’ he replied. ‘But how have you managed to hear the news before myself?’

‘From Messire de Bouville, whose messenger has ridden in haste so that I may give you this letter secretly.’

The Count of Poitiers broke the seals and read the letter, holding it close to his nose for he was very short-sighted. Again, he betrayed no sign of emotion; when he had finished reading, he merely slipped the letter into his gown. But he said no word.

The Cardinal also remained silent, pretending to respect the Prince’s sorrow, although he showed no great signs of affliction.

‘God preserve him from the pains of Hell,’ said the Count of Poitiers at last, to complement the prelate’s devout expression.

‘Yes … Hell,’ Duèze murmured. ‘Anyway, let us pray to God. I am also thinking of the unfortunate Queen Clémence, whom I saw grow up when I was with the King of Naples. So sweet and perfect a Princess …’

‘Yes, it’s a great misfortune for my sister-in-law,’ said Poitiers. And as he said it, he thought: ‘Louis has left no testamentary disposition for a regency. Already, from what Bouville writes, my Uncle Valois is at work …’

‘What are you going to do, Monseigneur? Will you return to Paris immediately?’ the Cardinal asked.

‘I don’t know, I don’t yet know,’ replied Poitiers. ‘I shall wait for more information. I shall hold myself at the disposition of the kingdom.’

In his letter Bouville had not concealed the fact that he wished for Poitiers’s return. As the elder of the dead King’s brothers, and as a peer of the kingdom, Poitiers’s place was at the Council of the Crown in which, at the very first meeting, dissension had broken out over the appointment of a regent.

But, on the other hand, Philippe of Poitiers felt regret, even reluctance, at having to leave Lyons before he had completed the tasks he had undertaken.

In the first place he had to conclude the contract of betrothal between his third daughter, Isabelle, who was barely five years of age, and the Dauphiniet of Viennois, the little Guigues, who was six. He had negotiated this marriage, at Vienne itself, with the Dauphin Jean II de la Tour du Pin and the Dauphine Beatrice, sister of Queen Clémence. It was a good alliance, which would allow the Crown of France to counterbalance the influence of Anjou-Sicily in this region. The document was to be signed in a few days’ time.⁴

And then, above all, there was the papal election. During the last weeks Philippe of Poitiers had journeyed backwards and forwards across Provence, Viennois and Lyonnais, interviewing each of the twenty-four scattered Cardinals in turn;⁵ assuring them that the aggression of Carpentras would not be repeated and that they would be subjected to no violence; giving many of them to understand that they might have a chance of election and pleading for the prestige of the Faith, the dignity of the Church and the interests of the States. Ultimately, as a result of much effort, talk and money, he had succeeded in gathering them at Lyons, a town which had long been under ecclesiastical authority but had passed recently, during the last years of Philip the Fair, into the power of the King of France.

The Count of Poitiers felt that he was on the point of reaching his goal. But if he left, would not the dissensions begin all over again, personal hatreds flourish once more, the influence of the Roman nobility or that of the King of Naples supplant that of France, while the various parties accused each other of heresy? Would not the papacy return to Rome? ‘Which my father so much wished to avoid,’ Philippe of Poitiers said to himself. ‘Is his work, already so much damaged by Louis and by our Uncle Valois, to be destroyed completely?’

For a few moments Cardinal Duèze felt that the young man had forgotten his presence. But suddenly Poitiers asked: ‘Will the Gascon party maintain the candidature of Cardinal de Pélagrue? Do you think that your pious colleagues are at last prepared to sit in Conclave? Sit down here, Monseigneur, and tell me your thoughts on the matter. How far have we advanced?’

The Cardinal had seen many sovereigns and ministers during the third of a century he had been concerned with the affairs of kingdoms, but he had never before met one with such self-control. Here was a Prince, aged twenty-three, to whom he had just announced the death of his brother and the vacancy of the throne, and he seemed to have no more urgent concern than the complications of the Conclave.

Sitting side by side near a window, on a chest covered with damask, the Cardinal’s feet barely touching the ground and the Count of Poitiers’s thin ankle slowly moving from side to side, the two men had a long conversation. It appeared from Duèze’s summary of the situation that they were more or less back where they had been two years ago, after the death of Clement V.

The party of the ten Gascon Cardinals, which was also called the French Party, was still the largest, but not large enough by itself to ensure the necessary majority of two-thirds of the Sacred College: sixteen votes. The Gascons considered themselves the depositories of the late Pope’s thought. They all owed their hats to him, held out firmly for the see of Avignon and showed themselves remarkably united against the other two parties. But there was a good deal of secret competition among them; the ambitions of Arnaud de Fougères, Arnaud Nouvel and Arnaud de Pélagrue all flourished. They made mutual promises while scheming for one another’s downfall.

‘The war of the three Arnauds,’ said Duèze in his whispering voice. ‘Now let’s have a look at the Italian Party.’

There were only eight of them, but divided into three sections. The redoubtable Cardinal Caetani, nephew of Pope Boniface VIII, was opposed to the two Cardinals Colonna by a time-honoured family feud which had become an inexorable hatred since the Anagni affair and the blow in the face Colonna had given Boniface. The other Italians wavered between these adversaries. Stefaneschi, from hostility to Philip the Fair’s policy, supported Caetani, whose relation moreover he was. Napoléon Orsini tacked about. The eight were only agreed on a single point: the return of the papacy to the Eternal City. On that point they were fiercely determined.

‘You know well, Monseigneur,’ continued Duèze, ‘that at one moment we ran the risk of schism; and indeed we still do so. Our Italians refused to meet in France and they let it be known, but a little while ago, that if a Gascon Pope were elected, they would refuse him recognition and would set up a Pope of their own in Rome.’

‘There will be no schism,’ said the Count of Poitiers calmly.

‘Thanks to you, Monseigneur, thanks to you. I am happy to recognize it, and I tell everyone so. Going, as you have, from town to town with sage advice, if you have not yet found the shepherd, you have at least gathered the flock.’

‘Expensive sheep, Monseigneur! Do you know that I left Paris with sixteen thousand livres, and that only the other week I had to have as much again sent to me? Jason was nothing compared to me. I hope that all these golden fleeces won’t slip through my fingers,’ said the Count of Poitiers, screwing up his eyes slightly to look the Cardinal in the face.

The Cardinal, who had done very well out of this largesse by roundabout ways, did not take up the allusion directly but replied: ‘I think that Napoléon Orsini and Albertini de Prato, and perhaps even Guillaume de Longis, who was Chancellor to the King of Naples before me, might be fairly easily detached. Avoiding schism is worth the price.’

Poitiers thought: ‘He has used the money we gave him to acquire three of the Italian votes. It’s clever of him.’

As for Caetani, though he continued to play an implacable game, he was not in so strong a position since his practice of sorcery and his attempt to cast a spell on the King of France and the Count of Poitiers himself had been discovered. The ex-Templar Everard, a half-wit, whom Caetani had used for his devilish work, had talked rather too much before giving himself up to the King’s men.

‘I am holding that matter in reserve,’ said the Count of Poitiers. ‘The smell of the faggots might, at the right moment, make Monseigneur Caetani a little more pliant.’

At the thought of seeing another Cardinal grilled, a very slight and furtive smile passed over the aged prelate’s thin lips.

‘It seems that Francesco Caetani’, he went on, ‘has quite abandoned God’s affairs to devote himself entirely to Satan’s. Do you think that, having failed with sorcery, he managed to strike at the King, your brother, with poison?’

The Count of Poitiers shrugged his shoulders.

‘Whenever a king dies, it’s asserted that he was poisoned,’ he said. ‘It was said of my ancestor, Louis VIII; it was said of my father, whom God keep. My brother’s health was poor enough. Still, one must take the possibility into account.’

‘Finally,’ Duèze went on, ‘there is the third party, which is called Provençal because of the most turbulent among us, Cardinal de Mandagout.’

This last party numbered only six Cardinals of diverse origin; southerners, such as the brothers Bérenger Frédol, were allied in it with Normans and with one member from Quercy, Duèze himself.

The gold lavished on them by Philippe of Poitiers had made them more receptive to the arguments of French policy.

‘We are the smallest, we are the weakest,’ said Duèze, ‘but our votes are decisive in any majority. And since the Gascons and the Italians each refuse to elect a Pope from the other party, then, Monseigneur …’

‘They’ll have to take a Pope from your party, won’t they?’

‘I believe so, I firmly believe so. I’ve said so ever since Clement died. No one listened to me; doubtless people thought I was preaching on my own behalf, for indeed my name had been mentioned without my wishing it. But the Court of France has never placed much confidence in me.’

‘It was because you were rather too openly supported by the Court of Naples, Monseigneur.’

‘And had I not been supported by someone, Monseigneur, who would have paid any heed to me at all? Believe me, I have no other ambition than to see a little order restored to the affairs of Christendom which are in a bad way; it will be a heavy task for the next successor to Saint Peter.’

The Count of Poitiers clasped his long hands together before his face and thought for a few seconds.

‘Do you think, Monseigneur,’ he asked, ‘that the Italians would agree to the Holy See remaining in Avignon in return for the satisfaction of not having a Gascon Pope, and that the Gascons, in return for the certainty of Avignon, would agree to renounce their own candidate and rally to your third party?’

By which he in fact meant: ‘If you, Monseigneur Duèze, became Pope with my support, would you formally agree to preserving the present residence of the papacy?’

Duèze perfectly understood.

‘It would, Monseigneur,’ he replied, ‘be the wise solution.’

‘I am grateful for your valuable advice,’ said Philippe of Poitiers, rising to his feet to put an end to the audience.

He showed the Cardinal out.

When two men, who to all seeming are utterly diverse in age, appearance, experience and position, recognize each other as of similar quality and believe that mutual collaboration and friendship are possible between them, it is due more to the mysterious conjunctions of destiny than to the words they may exchange.

When Philippe bowed to kiss his ring, the Cardinal murmured, ‘You would make an excellent regent, Monseigneur.’

Philippe straightened up. ‘Does he realize that I have been thinking all this time of nothing else?’ he wondered. And he replied: ‘Would you not yourself, Monseigneur, make an excellent Pope?’

And they could not help smiling discreetly to each other, the old man with a sort of paternal affection, the young man with friendly deference.

‘I will be beholden to you,’ Philippe added, ‘if you will keep secret the grave news you have brought me until it is publicly announced.’

‘I will do so, Monseigneur, in order to serve you.’

Left alone, the Count of Poitiers reflected only for a few seconds. Then he summoned his first chamberlain.

‘Adam Héron, has no courier arrived from Paris?’ he asked.

‘No, Monseigneur.’

‘Then close all the gates of Lyons.’

4
Let us Dry our Tears

THAT MORNING THE PEOPLE of Lyons were without vegetables. The market-gardeners’ wagons had been stopped outside the walls, and the housewives were clamouring in the empty markets. The only bridge, that over the Saône (for the one over the Rhône had not yet been completed), was barred by soldiery. But if one could not enter Lyons, one could not leave it either. Italian merchants, travellers, itinerant friars, reinforced by loungers and idlers, gathered about the gates and demanded an explanation. The guard invariably replied: ‘The Count of Poitiers’s orders,’ with the distant and important air that agents of authority tend to adopt when executing an order they do not understand.

People were shouting:

‘But my daughter is ill at Fouvière …’

‘My barn at Saint-Just burned down yesterday at vespers …’

‘The bailiff of Villefranche will have me arrested if I don’t take him my poll-tax today …’

‘The Count of Poitiers’s orders!’

And when the crowd began to press forward, the royal sergeants-at-arms raised their maces.

There were strange rumours going round the town.

Some declared that there was going to be war. But with whom? No one could say. Others asserted that a bloody riot had taken place during the night near the Augustinian monastery between the King’s men and those of the Italian Cardinals. Horses had been heard going by. Even the number of the dead was mentioned. But at the Augustinians’ all was quiet.

The Archbishop, Pierre de Savoie, was very anxious, wondering whether the events which had taken place before 1312 were about to begin all over again and whether he would be compelled to abandon, to the advantage of the archbishopric of Sens, the primacy of the Gaules, the only prerogative he had succeeded in preserving when Lyons had been attached to the Crown.⁶ He had sent one of his canons for news; but the canon, having gone to the Count of Poitiers’s lodging, had been met by a curtly silent equerry. And now the Archbishop was expecting an ultimatum.

The Cardinals, who were lodged in various religious houses, were no less anxious and, indeed, inclined to panic. Were they to be treated as they had been at Carpentras? But how could they escape this time? Messengers rushed from the Augustinians to the Franciscans and from the Jacobins to the Carthusians. Cardinal Caetani had sent his general assistant, the Abbé Pierre, to Napoléon Orsini, to Albertini de Prato and to Flisco, the only Spaniard, with orders to say to those prelates: ‘Look what has happened! You let yourselves be persuaded by the Count of Poitiers. He swore not to molest us, that we should not even have to go into seclusion to vote, and that we should be completely free. And now he has shut us up in Lyons!’

Duèze himself received the visit of two of his Provençal colleagues, Cardinal de Mandagout and Bérenger Frédol, the elder. But Duèze pretended to have but just emerged from his theological studies and to know nothing. During this time, in a cell near the Cardinal’s apartment, Guccio Baglioni was sleeping like a log, in no state to speculate what might be the cause of all the panic.

For the last hour Messire Varay, Consul of Lyons,⁷ and three of his colleagues, who had come to ask for an explanation in the name of the City Council, had been kept waiting in the Count of Poitiers’s antechamber.

The Count was sitting in camera with the members of his entourage and the great officers who were part of his delegation.

At last the hangings parted and the Count of Poitiers appeared, followed by his councillors. They all wore the grave expressions of men who had just reached an important political decision.

‘Ah, Messire Varay, you have come at the right moment, and you too, Messires Consuls,’ said the Count of Poitiers. ‘We can give you at once the message we were about to send you. Messire Mille, will you be so good as to read it?’

Mille de Noyers, a jurist, a Councillor of Parliament and Marshal of the East under Philip the Fair, unrolled the parchment and read as follows:

“To all the Bailiffs, Seneschals, and Councils of loyal towns. We would have you know the great sorrow that has befallen us by the death of our well-beloved brother, the King, our Lord Louis X, whom God has removed from the affection of his subjects. But human nature is such that no one may outlive the term assigned him. Thus we have decided to dry our tears, to pray with you to Christ for his soul, and to show ourselves assiduous for the government of the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of Navarre that their rights may not perish, and that the subjects of these two kingdoms may live happily beneath the buckler of justice and of peace.

“The Regent of the two Kingdoms, by the Grace of God.

PHILIPPE”

When they had recovered from their astonishment, Messire Varay immediately came forward and kissed the Count of Poitiers’s hand; then the other Consuls unhesitatingly followed suit.

The King was dead. The news was so surprising in itself that no one thought, for several minutes at least, of questioning it. In the absence of an heir who was of age, it seemed perfectly normal that the elder of the sovereign’s brothers should assume power. The Consuls did not for a moment doubt that the decision had been taken in Paris by the Chamber of Peers.

‘Have this message cried in the town,’ Philippe of Poitiers ordered; ‘which done, the gates will be immediately opened.’

Then he added: ‘Messire Varay, you hold a great position in the cloth trade; I should be glad if you would furnish me with twenty black cloaks which may be placed in the antechamber to clothe those who come to condole with me.’

He then dismissed the Consuls.

The two first acts of his seizure of power had been accomplished. He had been proclaimed Regent by his entourage, who became thereby his Council of Government. He would be recognized by the City of Lyons in which he was staying. He was now in a hurry to extend this recognition over the whole kingdom and thus place the accomplished fact before Paris. It was a question of speed.

Already the copyists were reproducing his proclamation in considerable quantities, and the couriers were saddling their horses to ride with it into every province.

As soon as the gates of Lyons were opened, they hastily set out, passing three couriers who had been kept on the other side of the Saône since morning. The first of them carried a letter from the Count of Valois, announcing himself as the Regent appointed by the Council of the Crown, and asking Philippe to agree, so that the appointment might become effective. ‘I am sure that you will wish to help me in my task for the good of the kingdom, and will give me your agreement as soon as possible, like the good and well-beloved nephew you are.’

The second message came from the Duke of Burgundy, who also claimed the regency in the name of his niece, the little Jeanne of Navarre.

Finally, the Count of Evreux informed Philippe of Poitiers that the peers had not sat in accordance with custom and precedent, and that Charles of Valois’s haste to seize the reins of government was supported by no legal document or assembly.

The Count of Poitiers had immediately gone into council again with his entourage. It was composed of men who were hostile to the policies pursued by the Hutin and the Count of Valois during the last eighteen months. In the first place, there was the Constable of France, Gaucher de Châtillon, Commander of the Armies since 1302, who could not forgive the ridiculous campaign of the ‘Muddy Army’ which he had been compelled to conduct in Flanders the preceding summer. Then there was his brother-in-law, Mille de Noyers, who shared his feelings. Then, the jurist Raoul de Presles who, after rendering so many services to the Iron King, had had his goods confiscated, while his friend Enguerrand de Marigny had been hanged and he himself had been put to the question by water though no confession had been extracted from him; as a result, he suffered from permanent stomach-pains and bore the ex-Emperor of Constantinople a considerable grudge. He owed his safety and his return to favour to the Count of Poitiers.

Thus a sort of opposition party, which included the survivors among the great councillors of Philip the Fair, had formed about the Count of Poitiers. No one looked kindly on the ambitions of the Count of Valois or indeed wanted the Duke of Burgundy to meddle in the affairs of the Crown. They admired the speed with which the young Prince had acted and they placed their hopes in him.

Poitiers wrote to Eudes of Burgundy and to Charles of Valois, without mentioning their letters, indeed as if he had not received them, to inform them that he considered himself Regent by natural right, and that he would summon the Assembly of Peers to give him its sanction as soon as possible.

In the meantime he appointed commissaries to go to the principal cities of the kingdom and assume authority in his name. Thus that day saw the departure of several of his knights – who were later to become his ‘Knights Pursuivant’⁸ – such as Regnault de Lor, Thomas de Marfontaine and Guillaume Courteheuse. He kept with him Anseau de Joinville, the son of the great Joinville, and Henry de Sully.

While the knell tolled from all the steeples, Philippe of Poitiers conferred for a long time with Gaucher de Châtillon. The Constable of France sat by right on every government assembly, the Chamber of Peers, the Grand Council and the Small Council. Philippe, therefore, asked Gaucher to go to Paris to represent him and oppose Charles of Valois’s usurpation until his own arrival; moreover, the Constable would make sure that all the troops in the capital, particularly the Corps of Crossbowmen, were under his control.

For the new Regent, at first to the surprise, but then to the approbation, of his councillors, had determined to remain temporarily in Lyons.

‘We cannot leave the tasks we have in hand,’ he had declared; ‘the most important thing for the kingdom is to have a Pope, and we shall be all the stronger when we have made him.’

He hurried on the signature of the contract of betrothal between his daughter and the Dauphiniet. At first sight this seemed to have no connection with the pontifical election, yet in Philippe’s mind they were linked. The alliance with the Dauphin of Viennois, who ruled over all the territories south of Lyons and controlled the road to Italy, was a move in his game. If the Cardinals took it into their heads to slip through his fingers, they would not be able to take refuge in that direction. Furthermore, the betrothal consolidated his position as Regent; the Dauphin would be in his camp and would have sound reasons for not abandoning him.

Because of mourning the contract was signed during the following days without festivities.

At the same time Philippe of Poitiers negotiated with the most powerful baron of the region, the Count de Forez, who was also a brother-in-law of the Dauphin, and held the right bank of the Rhône.

Jean de Forez had fought in the campaign in Flanders, had several times represented Philip the Fair at the Papal Court, and had done very good work in getting Lyons ceded to the Crown. The Count of Poitiers knew that as soon as he resumed his father’s policy he could count on him.

On the 16th of June the Count de Forez performed a highly spectacular gesture. He paid solemn homage to Philippe as the suzerain of all the suzerains of France, thus recognizing him as the holder of the royal authority.

The following day Count Bermond de la Voulte, whose fief of Pierregourde was in the seneschalship of Lyons, placed his hands between those of the Count of Poitiers and swore him a similar oath of loyalty.

Poitiers asked the Count de Forez to hold ready seven hundred men-at-arms in secret. The Cardinals would not now be able to escape from the town.

Nevertheless, there was still a long way to go before an election was achieved. Negotiations lagged. The Italians, feeling that the Regent was in haste to return to Paris, had hardened in their position. ‘He’ll tire first,’ they said. Little they cared for the tragic state of anarchy in which the affairs of the Church were foundering.

Philippe of Poitiers had several interviews with Cardinal Duèze, who seemed to him much the most intelligent member of the Conclave, at once the most lucid and the most imaginative expert in religious matters, and the most desirable administrator for Christendom in these difficult times.

‘Heresy is flourishing everywhere, Monseigneur,’ said the Cardinal in his cracked, disquieting voice. ‘And how could it be otherwise with the example we give? The Devil takes advantage of our discord to sow his tares. But it is above all in the diocese of Toulouse that they flourish the most vigorously. It is an old land of rebellion and nightmare! The next Pope should divide that too-extensive diocese, so difficult to govern, into five bishoprics, placed in firm hands.’

‘Which would create a number of new benefices,’ replied the Count of Poitiers, ‘from which, of course, the Treasury of France would receive the annates. You see no objection to that?’

‘None.’

The first year’s revenues from new ecclesiastical benefices were called ‘annates’, which the King had a right to collect. The absence of a Pope prevented appointments being made to these benefices, which was a considerable loss to the Treasury, without taking into account the near-impossibility of collecting the arrears of taxes from the Church, while the clergy took advantage of the situation to raise every kind of difficulty which could not be resolved so long as the throne of Saint Peter was vacant. And indeed, when Philippe and Duèze considered the future, one as Regent, the other as eventual Pontiff, finance was the first concern of both.

Owing to the feudal rebellions, the revolt of the Flemings, the insurrection of the nobles of Artois and the brilliant inspirations of Charles of Valois, the royal Treasury was not only empty, but indebted for several years to come.

The papal Treasury, after two years of errant Conclave, was in no better state; and if the Cardinals sold themselves dearly to the princes of this world, it was because many of them no longer had any means of subsistence other than bartering their votes.

‘Fines, Monseigneur, fines,’ Duèze counselled the young Regent. ‘Fine those who have misbehaved, and the richer they are, the more heavily. If someone should break the law who has a hundred livres, take twenty; if he has a thousand, take five hundred; and should he have a hundred thousand, take practically all that he has. You’ll find that this policy has three advantages: in the first place, the yield will be the greater; in the second, deprived of his power, the malefactor will no longer be able to abuse it; and, finally, the poor, of whom there are great numbers, will be on your side and place confidence in your justice.’

Philippe of Poitiers smiled.

‘What you so wisely suggest, Monseigneur, may be most suitable to royal justice which is a secular arm,’ he replied, ‘but in order to restore the finances of the Church, I do not see …’

‘Fines, fines,’ repeated Duèze. ‘Let us place a tax on sin; it will be an inexhaustible source of revenue. Man is sinful by nature, but more disposed to penitence of the heart than of the purse. He will regret his sins the more keenly, and be the more hesitant to relapse into error, if our absolutions are accompanied by a tax. Whoever wishes to reform must pay for the privilege.’

‘Is he joking?’ thought Poitiers, who, as he saw more of Duèze, was discovering the Cardinal in Curia’s liking for paradox and mystification.

‘And what sins do you propose taxing, Monseigneur?’ he asked, as if he were joining in the game.

‘In the first place those committed by the clergy. We must begin by reforming ourselves before we undertake to reform others. Our Holy Mother is too tolerant of shortcomings and abuses. Thus, neither holy orders nor priesthood may be given to men who are mutilated or deformed. And yet, the other day, I saw a certain Abbé Pierre, who is with Cardinal Caetani, with two thumbs on his left hand.’

‘A little hit at our old enemy,’ thought Poitiers.

‘I have made inquiries,’ Duèze went on, ‘and it appears that the halt, the maimed and the eunuchs who conceal their misfortune beneath a habit, and indeed are beneficed by the Church, are legion. Are we to cast them from our bosom rather than efface their fault, reduce them to penury and perhaps throw them into the arms of the heretics of Toulouse or similar religious confraternities? Let us permit them rather to redeem themselves; and to redeem is to pay.’

The old prelate was perfectly serious. His imagination, stimulated by his meeting with the Abbé Pierre, had created, during these last nights, a complete and precise system on which he intended writing a memorandum to be submitted, so he modestly said, to the next Pope.

It was to create a Holy Office of Penitentiary, which would bring in revenue to the Holy See from bulls of absolution of all kinds. Mutilated priests might obtain absolution at the rate of a few livres for a missing finger, twice as much for a lost eye, and the same for the absence of one or both testicles. A priest who had castrated himself would have to pay a higher price. From bodily infirmities Duèze passed to those of the soul. Bastards who had concealed their condition when receiving orders, priests who had taken the tonsure though married, priests who married secretly after ordination while it was still current, priests who lived unmarried with a woman, priests who were bigamists, or incestuous, or sodomites, would all be taxed proportionately to their sin. Nuns who had wantoned with several men, either within or without their convent, would be subject to particularly costly rehabilitation.⁹

‘If the creation of this Penitentiary’, declared Duèze, ‘does not bring in two hundred thousand livres the first year, I’ll be …’

He was going to say ‘I’ll be burnt’, but stopped in time.

‘At least,’ thought Poitiers, ‘if he’s elected, I shall have no need to be concerned for the papal finances.’

But in spite of all Duèze’s manoeuvres, and in spite of the support Poitiers gave him secretly, the Conclave still marked time.

Moreover, the news from Paris was far from good. Gaucher de Châtillon, making common front with the Count of Evreux and Mahaut of Artois, was doing his best to put a brake on Charles of Valois’s ambitions. But Charles was living in the Palace of the Cité, where he had Queen Clémence at his mercy; he was running affairs as he pleased, and sending out to the provinces instructions contrary to those sent by Poitiers from Lyons. Moreover, the Duke of Burgundy had arrived in Paris, on the 16th of June, to establish his rights; he knew that he had the support of the vassals of his huge duchy. France, therefore, had three regents. This situation could not continue for long, and Gaucher asked Philippe to return to Paris.

On the 27th of June, after a restricted council meeting, attended by the Count de Forez and the Count de la Voulte, the young Prince decided to set out as soon as possible, and ordered his escort’s baggage-train to be assembled. At the same time, learning that no solemn mass had yet been held for the repose of his brother’s soul, he ordered masses to be said on the following day, before his departure, in every parish in the town. All the high and low clergy were expected to attend to join their prayers with the Regent’s.

The Cardinals, particularly the Italians, were delighted. Philippe of Poitiers was being compelled to leave Lyons without having made them give way.

‘He is concealing his flight under the pomp of mourning,’ said Caetani, ‘but let him go all the same, that accursed young man. He thought he held us in the hollow of his hand. I assure you that we shall be back in Rome before the month is out.’

5
The Gates of the Conclave

CARDINALS ARE IMPORTANT PEOPLE who must not be mixed with the small fry of the clergy. The Count of Poitiers had ordered that the church of the monastery of the Predicant Friars, called the Church of the Jacobins,¹⁰ the most beautiful, the largest, after the Primatial Saint-Jean, and also the best fortified, should be reserved to them for the service to the memory of Louis X. The Cardinals saw in this selection no more than normal respect for their dignity. None was absent from the ceremony.

They numbered but twenty-four and yet the church was full, for each Cardinal was escorted by his whole household – chaplain, secretary, treasurer, clerks, pages, valets, linkmen and trainbearers: nearly six hundred people in all were assembled between the massive white pillars.

Rarely had a funeral mass been followed with so little peaceful meditation. It was the first time for many months that the Cardinals, who had been living in cliques in separate residences, had found themselves all gathered together. Some had not seen each other for nearly two years. They watched each other, quizzed each other, commented on each other’s actions and appearance.

‘Did you see that?’ someone would whisper. ‘Orsini has greeted the younger Frédol. Stefaneschi has been talking for quite a while to Mandagout. Are they rallying to the Provençaux? But Duèze doesn’t look at all well; he’s grown much older.’

And, indeed, Jacques Duèze was making an effort to control his youthful lightness of foot, and walked in with slow step, replying to greetings vaguely, as if he were already detached from this world.

Guccio Baglioni, dressed as a page, formed part of his suite. He was supposed to speak nothing but Italian and to have come straight from Sienna.

‘Perhaps I should have done better,’ thought Guccio, ‘to have put myself under the Count of Poitiers’s protection, for I should certainly have gone back to Paris with him today and I should have been able to make inquiries about Marie, of whom I have had no news for so long. Instead of which, here I am, entirely dependent on this old fox, to whom I have promised my uncle’s money, but who will do nothing for me till the money has arrived. And my uncle does not reply. They say that Paris is in turmoil. Marie, Marie, my beautiful Marie! She’ll think I’ve abandoned her. Perhaps she even hates me now? What have they done with her?’

He imagined her shut up at Cressay by her brothers, or in some convent for Magdalens. ‘Another week like this, and I shall go back to Paris.’

Duèze turned every now and then to look behind him with a curiously alert expression.

‘Are you afraid of something, Monseigneur?’ Guccio asked.

‘No, no, I fear nothing,’ replied the Cardinal, who began secretly observing his neighbours.

The redoubtable Cardinal Caetani, with his thin face divided by a long aquiline nose, and his hair which seemed to shoot out like white flames from the edge of his red skull-cap, made no attempt to conceal his triumph. The catafalque, symbol of Louis X’s death, corresponded in his mind to the waxen doll, pierced with pins, with which he had cast a spell. The glances he exchanged with his following, the Abbé Pierre, Father Bost and the clerk Andrieu, his secretary, were those of victory. He wanted to say to all those present: ‘This, Messeigneurs, is what happens when you attract the vengeance of the Caetani, who were already powerful at the time of Julius Caesar.’

The two brothers Colonna, each heavy chin divided by a vertical cleft, looked like warriors disguised as prelates.

The Count of Poitiers had not economized on the choir. There were a full hundred of them, their voices sounding above the organ, which had four men pumping at its bellows. A royal, reverberating music echoed among the vaults, saturated the air with vibrations, and enveloped the crowd. The junior clerks could gossip among themselves with impunity, and the pages laugh or mock their masters. It was impossible to hear what was being said three paces away, and still less what was taking place at the doors.

The service came to an end; the organ and the choir fell silent. Both wings of the great door stood open; but no daylight penetrated into the church.

Suddenly, the Cardinals understood; and an angry clamour broke out. A brand-new wall blocked the doorway. During the mass, the Regent had bricked up the exits. All occurred during the ceremony, obscuring the sun. The Cardinals were prisoners.

There was a fine panic; prelates, canons, priests and valets, all mingled together, ran to and fro like rats in a trap. The pages, climbing on each other’s shoulders, hoisted themselves up to the windows, from where they shouted: ‘The church is surrounded by armed men!’

‘What are we going to do, what are we going to do?’ groaned the Cardinals. ‘The Regent has played a trick on us.’

‘That’s why he favoured us with such loud music!’

‘It’s an attack on the Church. What are we going to do?’

‘We’ll excommunicate him,’ cried Caetani.

‘But what if he starves us to death, or has us massacred?’

The two brothers Colonna and the people of their party had already armed themselves with heavy bronze candelabra, benches and processional maces, determined to sell their lives dearly. The Italians and the Gascons were already beginning to hurl reproaches at each other.

‘All this is your fault,’ cried the Italians. ‘If you had only refused to come to Lyons. We knew some dastardly trick would be played on us.’

‘If you had elected one of us, we should not be here now,’ replied the Gascons.

‘It’s your fault, you bad Christians!’

They were almost on the point of coming to blows.

One door alone had not been entirely blocked; barely room for a man to pass through had been left, but the narrow opening was a hedge of pikes held in iron gauntlets. The pikes lifted and the Count de Forez, in armour, followed by Bermond de la Voulte and a few more armed men, entered the church. They were received with a volley of threats and obscene insults.

His hands crossed on the hilt of his sword, the Count de Forez waited till the clamour died down. He was a strong, courageous man, unmoved by threats or entreaties, profoundly shocked by the example the Cardinals had given during the last two years, and prepared to go to any length to obey the Count of Poitiers’s instructions. His rugged, wrinkled face appeared through his open visor.

When the Cardinals and their people had grown hoarse, his voice rang out over their heads, precise and emphatic, reaching to the end of the nave.

‘Messeigneurs, I am here on the orders of the Regent of France to ask you to devote yourselves henceforth solely to electing a Pope, and to inform you that you will not leave here until that Pope is elected. Each Cardinal may keep with him only one chaplain and two pages or clerks of his choice to serve him. Everyone else will leave.’

The Gascons and the Provençaux were no less indignant than the Italians.

‘It’s a felony!’ cried Cardinal de Pélagrue. ‘The Count of Poitiers promised us that we should not even have to go into seclusion, and it was because of it that we agreed to meet him at Lyons.’

‘The Count of Poitiers’, replied Jean de Forez, ‘was then speaking in the name of the King of France. But the King of France is dead, and it is in the name of the Regent that I am speaking to you today.’

There was unanimous indignation among his hearers. There were oaths in Italian, Provençal and French. Cardinal Duèze had fallen prostrate in a confessional, his hand to his heart, as if his years could not bear the shock, and he pretended to join in the protests with inaudible murmurs. Arnaud d’Auch, the Cardinal Camerlingo, a corpulent and sanguine prelate, advanced on the Count de Forez and said menacingly: ‘Messire, a Pope cannot be elected in such conditions, for you are violating the constitution of Gregory X, which obliges the Conclave to meet in the town in which the Pope died.’

‘You were there, Monseigneur, two years ago, and you dispersed without having made a Pope, which is also a breach of the constitution. But if, by any chance, you should wish to be taken back to Carpentras, we will conduct you there under a good escort and in closed coaches.’

‘We may not deliberate under the threat of force!’

‘That is why there are seven hundred men outside, Monseigneur, to guard you. They have been provided by the authorities of the town to ensure your protection and your isolation, as the constitution prescribes. The Sire de la Voulte here, who is a native of Lyons, is in command of them. Messire the Regent also wishes you to know that if, by the third day, you have not agreed, you will receive but one dish in the twenty-four hours by way of food and, after the ninth day, there will be but bread and water, as is also prescribed in the constitution of Gregory. And finally, if enlightenment does not come to you through fasting, he will destroy the roof and expose you to the inclemency of the weather.’

Bérenger Frédol, the elder, intervened: ‘Messire, you will be guilty of murder if you subject us to such treatment, for there are some among us who will not be able to support it. Look at Monseigneur Duèze, who has already collapsed and is in need of care.’

‘Oh, yes, oh, most certainly,’ Duèze complained feebly; ‘I shall most certainly not be able to support it.’

‘What’s the use?’ cried Caetani. ‘Can’t you see we have to do with savage and stinking beasts? But let me tell you, Messire, that instead of electing a Pope, we shall excommunicate you, you and your perjurer.’

‘If you hold a meeting of excommunication, Monseigneur Caetani,’ the Count de Forez replied calmly, ‘the Regent might make known to the Conclave the name of certain sorcerers and casters of spells who should be put at the top of the list for roasting.’

‘I really don’t see,’ said Caetani, beating a hasty retreat, ‘I really don’t see what sorcery has to do with the matter, since it’s with the election of a Pope that we are concerned.’

‘Ah, Monseigneur, I see we understand each other; please dismiss the people you do not need, because there will not be enough food to feed them all.’

The Cardinals realized that all resistance was vain and that this armed man, who was giving them the Count of Poitiers’s orders in so firm a voice, was adamant. Already, behind Jean de Forez, the men-at-arms were beginning to enter one by one, pike in hand, and to deploy at the end of the church.

‘Since we cannot use force, we shall use cunning,’ said Caetani in a low voice to the Italians. ‘Let us pretend to submit, because at the moment we can do no other.’

They each chose the three most faithful servants from among their following, those they thought might be the best advisers, the most cunning in intrigue, or the most apt at tending to their physical wants in the difficult material circumstances in which they would have to live. Caetani kept Father Bost, Andrieu and Pierre, the priest with the two thumbs, that is to say the men who had been implicated in casting the spell on Louis X; he preferred that they should be shut up with him, rather than risk their talking either for money or under torture. The Colonnas kept four pages who could fell an ox with their fists. Canons, clerks, linkmen and trainbearers began to leave, one by one, through the hedge of armed men. As they passed, their masters whispered:

‘Let my brother the Bishop know … Write in my name to my cousin de Got … Leave at once for Rome …’

At the moment when Guccio Baglioni was preparing to leave, Jacques Duèze put out his thin hand from within the confessional, where he lay in a state of collapse, and seized the young Italian by his robe, murmuring: ‘Stay with me, my boy. I am sure you will be a great help to me.’

Duèze knew from experience that the power of money was far from negligible within a Conclave; it was an unhoped-for piece of luck to have with him a representative of the Lombard banks.

An hour later there remained inside the Church of the Jacobins but ninety-six men, who were fated to stay there as long as twenty-four among them had not agreed on the election of one. Before leaving, the men-at-arms had carried in armfuls of straw to make beds, on the very stone itself, for the most powerful prelates of the world. A few basins had been brought, that they might wash themselves, and water, in great jars, had been placed at their disposal. Under the eye of the Count de Forez, the masons had walled up the last exit, merely leaving a little square opening halfway up, a window just wide enough to allow food to be passed in, but too narrow for a man to pass through. All round the church the soldiers had taken up their positions six yards apart and in two ranks: one rank with backs to the wall looked towards the town; the other faced the church and watched the windows.

Towards midday the Count of Poitiers set out for Paris. He took with him in his following the Dauphin of Viennois and the little Dauphiniet, who would henceforth live at his Court in order to get to know his five-year-old betrothed.

At the same hour the Cardinals received their first meal: since it was a fast day, they were given no meat.

6
From Neauphle to Saint-Marcel

ON A MORNING EARLY in July, well before dawn, Jean de Cressay entered his sister’s room. The large young man carried a smoking candle; he had washed his beard and was wearing his best riding-cloak.

‘Get up, Marie,’ he said. ‘You’re leaving this morning. Pierre and I are going to take you.’

The girl sat up in bed.

‘Leave? What do you mean? Have I got to leave this morning?’

Her mind was still hazy from sleep and she stared in incomprehension at her brother out of her huge dark blue eyes. She automatically shook back over her shoulders her long thick, silky hair, in which there were golden lights.

Jean de Cressay looked at his sister’s beauty without pleasure, as if it were a sin.

‘Pack up your clothes, for you won’t be coming back for a long time.’

‘But where are you taking me?’ asked Marie.

‘You’ll see.’

‘But why did you not say anything about it yesterday?’

‘What, so that you might still have time to play another trick on us? Come on, hurry up; I want to get started before our serfs see us. You’ve brought us shame enough; there’s no point in giving them more cause for gossip.’

Marie did not reply. For the last month her family had treated her like this and spoken to her in this tone of voice. She got up, feeling the weight of her five months’ pregnancy which, though still light, always surprised her when she rose in the morning. By the light of the candle Jean had left her, she made ready, washed her face and neck and quickly tied up her hair; she noticed that her hands were trembling. Where were they taking her? To what convent? She placed about her neck the gold reliquary Guccio had given her, which had come, so he had said, from Queen Clémence. ‘Up to now the relics have not been much protection,’ she thought. ‘Have I not prayed to them enough?’ She packed an overdress, a few underdresses, a surcoat and some towels for washing.

‘You’ll wear your cloak with the big hood,’ Jean said, as he looked into her room for a moment.

‘But I shall die of heat!’ said Marie. ‘It’s a winter cloak.’

‘Your mother wishes you to travel with your face hidden. Do as you’re told and hurry.’

In the courtyard the second brother, Pierre, was saddling the two horses himself.

Marie had known that this day was bound to come; in one way, however sad she felt at heart, she was not altogether sorry; at moments she had even looked forward to this departure. The most austere of convents would be more tolerable than the constant complaints and reproaches to which she had been subjected. At least she would be alone with her misfortune. She would no longer have to bear the anger of her mother, who had been bedridden from a stroke ever since the scandal had broken, and who cursed her daughter every time Marie brought her an infusion of herbs. They had had to summon urgently the surgeon-barber of Neauphle to draw a pint of dark blood from the stout lady of the manor. Dame Eliabel had been bled six times in less than a fortnight, but the treatment did not appear to be accelerating her return to health.

Marie was treated by her two brothers, particularly by Jean, as a criminal. Oh, rather the cloister a thousand times over! But would she ever be able to get news of Guccio in the convent? That was her obsession, her greatest fear at the fate awaiting her. Her wicked brothers had told her that Guccio had fled abroad.

‘They don’t want to admit it,’ she thought, ‘but they have had him put in prison. It’s not possible, simply not possible, that he has deserted me! Or perhaps he has returned to the country to save me; and that is why they are in such a hurry to take me away; and then they’ll kill him. Why did I not agree to go away with him? I refused to listen to him so as not to wound my mother and my brothers, and now the worst has befallen me as a result of trying to do right.’

Her imagination conjured up every possible form of disaster. There were moments when she even hoped that Guccio had really fled, leaving her to her fate. With no one from whom to ask advice or even compassion, she had no company but her unborn child; but that life was not yet of much help to her, except for the courage with which it inspired her.

At the moment of leaving, Marie de Cressay asked if she could say goodbye to her mother. Pierre went up to Dame Eliabel’s room, but there issued from it such a shouting on the part of the widow, whose voice appeared but little affected by the bleedings, that Marie realized it was useless. Pierre came down again, his face sad, his hands spread wide in a gesture of impotence.

‘She said that she no longer had a daughter,’ he said.

And Marie thought once again: ‘I should have done better to run away with Guccio. It’s all my fault. I should have gone with him.’

The two brothers mounted their horses and Jean de Cressay took his sister up on the crupper, because his horse was the better of the two, or rather the less bad. Pierre was riding the broken-winded nag, whose nostrils made a roaring sound, and on which, the previous month, the two brothers had made so distinguished an entry into the capital.

Marie cast a final glance at the little manor she had never left since she was born and which now, in the half-light of the uncertain dawn, already seemed to be clothed in a grey mist of memory. Every moment of her life, since she had first opened her eyes, was contained within these walls and in this countryside: her childish games, the surprising daily discovery of herself and of the world, which every human being makes in his turn, the infinite diversity of plants in the fields, the strange shapes of flowers, the marvellous pollen in their hearts, the softness of the down on young ducks’ breasts and the play of sunlight on dragonflies’ wings. She was leaving all those hours she had spent in watching herself grow, listening to her dreams, every stage of her changing face that she had so often admired in the clear waters of the Mauldre, and also that great joy at being alive she had sometimes felt when she lay full length on her back in the middle of a field, looking for omens in the shapes of the clouds and imagining God in the depths of the sky. She passed by the chapel, where her father lay beneath a stone flag and where the Italian monk had married her secretly to Guccio.

‘Lower your hood,’ her brother Jean ordered.

As soon as they had crossed the river, he hastened his horse’s pace, and Pierre’s began roaring at once.

‘Jean, aren’t we going rather too fast?’ said Pierre, indicating Marie with a jerk of the head.

‘To hell with it! Bad seed’s always solidly sown,’ replied the elder, as if he hoped wickedly for an accident.

But his hopes were disappointed. Marie was a strong girl and made for motherhood. She rode the twenty-five miles from Neauphle to Paris without showing any signs of weakness. She was bruised and suffocating with heat, but did not complain. From under her hood she saw nothing of Paris but the surface of the streets, the bottoms of the houses and headless people. What legs! What shoes! She would have liked to raise her hood but dared not. What surprised her most was the noise, the immense rumbling of the city, the voices of the street-hawkers selling every kind of ware, the noises made by the various trades; in certain alleys the crowd was so dense that the horses could hardly force their way through. Passers-by jostled Marie’s legs; but at length the horses came to a halt. She dismounted, feeling tired and dusty; she was allowed to raise her hood.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, gazing in surprise at the courtyard of a fine house.

‘At your Lombard’s uncle’s house,’ replied Jean de Cressay.

A few moments later Messer Tolomei, one eye shut and the other open, gazed at the three children of the late Sire de Cressay as they sat in a row before him, Jean bearded, Pierre clean-shaven, and their sister beside them, a little withdrawn, her head bowed.

‘You understand, Messer Tolomei,’ said Jean, ‘that you made us a promise.’

‘Of course, of course,’ replied Tolomei, ‘and I’m going to keep it, my friends, have no fear.’

‘You understand that it must be kept quickly. You understand that after all the gossip there has been about her shame, our sister can no longer live with us. You understand that we no longer dare appear in our neighbours’ houses, that even our serfs mock us as we go by, and that it will be worse still when our sister’s sin becomes more apparent.’

Tolomei had a reply on the tip of his tongue: ‘But, my lads, it’s you who have caused all the scandal! No one compelled you to pursue Guccio like madmen, rousing the whole town of Neauphle and announcing the mishap more publicly than if it had been cried by the town-crier.’

‘And our mother is not recovering from our misfortune; she has cursed her daughter, and seeing Marie near renews her anger until we fear she may die of it. You understand …’

‘This idiot, like everyone who asks you to understand, can’t have much sense in his head. When he has had his say he’ll stop. But what I do very well understand,’ the banker said to himself, ‘is why Guccio is mad about this pretty girl. Till now I thought he was wrong, but I’ve changed my opinion since she came into the room; and if my age would still let me, I’ve no doubt that I should behave more foolishly than he has done. Beautiful eyes, beautiful hair, beautiful skin – a true spring flower. And how bravely she bears her misfortunes; really, they both make such a fuss you might think it was they who had been ravished. But, poor child, her suffering is greater than theirs. She must surely have a nice nature. What bad luck to have been born under the same roof as these two oafs, and how I should like Guccio to be able to marry her openly so she could live here and rejoice my old age with the sight of her.’

He did not stop looking at her. Marie raised her eyes to him, lowered them at once, then raised them again, troubled at what he might be thinking of her and by his insistent gaze.

‘You understand, Messer, that your nephew …’

‘Oh, I disown him, I’ve disinherited him! If he had not fled to Italy, I think I’d have killed him with my own hands. If I could only find out where he’s hiding …’ said Tolomei, taking his forehead in his hands with an air of dejection.

But through the little chink between his hands, allowing no one but the girl to see, he twice raised the heavy eyelid which normally he kept closed. Marie realized that she had an ally and could not restrain a sigh. Guccio was alive, Guccio was in a safe place, and Tolomei knew where. What did the cloister matter to her now!

She was no longer listening to what her brother Jean was saying. She knew it all by heart. Even Pierre de Cressay sat silent, looking vaguely weary. Without daring to say so, he blamed himself for having also given way to anger. He was leaving it to his brother to convince himself that he had acted properly; he left it to Jean to speak of the honour of their blood and the laws of chivalry, so as to justify their immense folly.

When the Cressay brothers came from their poor little ramshackle manor, from their courtyard which stank of the dunghill all the year round, and saw Tolomei’s princely residence, the brocades, the silver bowls, when they felt beneath their fingers the delicate carving on the chairs and became aware of that atmosphere of wealth and abundance which permeated the whole house, they were forced to recognize that their sister would not have been so badly off if they left her to her own inclination. The younger one sincerely regretted it. ‘At least one of us would have been well provided for, and we should all have benefited,’ he thought. But the bearded one, with his stubborn nature, merely felt the more spite as well as a base jealousy. ‘Why should her sins give her a right to so much wealth through sinning, while we live so poorly?’

Nor was Marie insensible to the luxury around her; it dazzled her, and merely increased her regrets.

‘If only Guccio had been even a little noble,’ she thought, ‘or if we had not been noble at all! What does chivalry matter? Can it be a good thing, when it makes one suffer so much? And is not wealth a sort of nobility in itself? What is the difference between making serfs labour and making money work?’

‘You need have no concern, my friends,’ said Tolomei at last; ‘leave everything to me. It’s the duty of uncles to repair the faults committed by their wicked nephews. Thanks to my influential friends, I have succeeded in getting your sister accepted by the Royal Convent of the Daughters of Saint-Marcel. Does that satisfy you?’

The two Cressay brothers looked at each other and nodded their heads in approval. The Convent of the Clarisses in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel enjoyed the highest reputation among female religious establishments. It was almost entirely confined to the daughters of the nobility. And it was there that the royal family’s bastards were occasionally concealed behind the veil. Jean de Cressay’s ill-temper vanished at once, appeased by the vanity of caste. And, to show that the Cressays were not unworthy of what was being done for their sister in her sin, he added hastily: ‘Excellent, excellent; besides, I think the Abbess is some sort of a relation of ours; our mother has often quoted her to us as an example.’

‘Then everything is for the best,’ continued Tolomei. ‘I shall take your sister to Messire Hugues de Bouville, the ex-Grand Chamberlain …’

The two brothers bowed slightly in their chairs to show their respect.

‘… from whom I obtained this favour,’ Tolomei went on; ‘and tonight, I promise you, she shall be inside the convent. You can therefore go home reassured; I will keep you informed.’

The two brothers asked no better. They were getting rid of their sister, and thought that they had done enough by handing her over to the care of others. The silence of the cloister would close over the scandal which, at Cressay, need from now on be mentioned only in whispers, or not even be mentioned at all.

‘May God keep you and inspire you with repentance,’ said Jean to his sister by way of goodbye.

He put much more warmth into his farewell to Tolomei and thanked him for the trouble he was taking. He very nearly reproached Marie for the grief she was causing this excellent man.

‘God keep you, Marie,’ said Pierre with emotion.

He wanted to kiss his sister, but dared not do so under the severe eye of his elder brother. And Marie found herself alone with the fat banker with the dark complexion, the fleshy mouth and the closed eye, who, strange as it might seem, was her uncle.

The two horses left the courtyard and the roaring of the broken-winded nag could be heard growing fainter; it was the last sound of Cressay moving out of Marie’s ken.

‘And now, let us eat, my child. And while we dine, we don’t weep,’ said Tolomei.

He helped the girl take off the cloak which was suffocating her; Marie looked surprised and grateful, for it was the first mark of attention, or even of simple courtesy, she had been shown for many weeks.

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