The Dream Maker (35 page)

Alas, the king's satisfaction in my regard, although it had flattering effects, also disturbed my peace of mind, because he sent me back to Italy. He had appreciated my intervention in the affair in Genoa, even though it had ultimately failed. Charles was beginning to understand what a mission must consist of. Prior to this he had been far too susceptible to the influence of the princes. For those great lords, representing the king meant bringing together a group of bishops and marshals, men who had great names and were rigid with their own self-importance. As a rule, the result was catastrophic. Such worthy notables listen to no one, have great difficulty getting along, and in the end they can be taken in by anyone—if, as is often the case nowadays, they are not received by men as noble as themselves, but rather by scoundrels.

With me the king had discovered another method. In Genoa I spoke with everyone and without any prior protocol. With my interlocutors I used the new universal language, which, alas, had replaced the codes of chivalry: money. Some can be bought, others must be paid, promises are made to this one, credit extended to that one: it is a language that everyone understands. Just as Charles had finally defeated the English by abandoning the methods of chivalry and using the weapons of the villeins, now, in similar fashion, he intended to exercise a new form of diplomacy, particularly with the myriad small states clustered around the Mediterranean. And unfortunately for my own tranquility, he made me his diplomat. The affair with which he entrusted me was, in its way, even more complicated than Genoa, because it had to do with the pope.

I have never had much appetite for matters of religion. During my childhood, because of the Schism, we had multiple popes. The papacy was such a comfortable position that there were two, even three of them who claimed the right to fill it. My mother suffered greatly from these papal turpitudes and she prayed that the church would recover its unity. My brother devoted himself to that cause, pacing up and down the corridors of Rome. As for me, I nurtured secret, insolent thoughts. Today I can reveal them without fear that they might wrong me, any more than I have already been wronged: I believed that God must know best how to tidy up his own affairs. If he was not capable of deciding who should represent him on this earth, no doubt it meant that he did not wield the almighty power one attributed to him. Later on I would always comply with the customs of religion, but without seeing it as anything more than an obligation.

Although we never discussed it, Macé had always understood that I did not share her faith, and she did not hold this against me. What she would not forgive, however, was my mistrust of prelates. She had always been fascinated by their unctuous piety, their serene authority, and she was dazzled by their sense of pomp and luxury. Their great expenses were justified by the fact that they were incurred in God's name, and this removed any remaining scruples Macé might have had to be sensitive to their ostentation.

As for me, I like the raw power that nothing can hide, the raw power of kings and wealthy merchants. That power, at least, speaks its name. It shows its true face, and it is up to each individual to decide what he intends to do with it. Ecclesiasti­cal power makes it way beneath the mask of humility. It never acts or strikes without invoking the submission of those who exert it to a superior force, to which they claim to be the slaves. In short, when one is in the presence of a man of the cloth, one does not know with whom one is dealing: a master or a servant, a weak man or a strong one. Everything in their world is uncertain and secret, concealing hidden traps that one discovers only once the ground has already given way beneath one's feet.

I had always taken care to avoid venturing into their presence. To be sure, at the time I was appointed to the Argenterie, I had taken part in the assembly at Bourges that had prepared the Pragmatic Sanction. Since the pontiff had left Avignon and returned to Rome, he had become, as far as the king of France was concerned, a foreign power, whose intervention in the internal affairs of the realm could not be tolerated. Through the Pragmatic Sanction, the king now asserted that his sovereignty over the Church of France could safeguard it from any abuse on the part of the pontiff. I was in agreement with Charles on this point. Together with the struggle against the princes and the financial reform, this text would give the king absolute power over his country. But I could not go too far in showing my support for the king's initiatives, on pain of displeasing the pope in Rome, whom I needed for my business. Through the intermediary of my brother Nicholas, I regularly obtained dispensations from the pope authorizing me to trade with the Muslims.

The religious quarrels became even more complicated when the Ecumenical Council met in Basel and set about curtailing the pope's powers and limiting his excesses. One could not help but subscribe to such a praiseworthy program.

Alas, the Council rebelled so thoroughly that it elected another pope. The old schism had been reignited. I told myself that there was really nothing to expect from the clerics. It so happened that I knew the antipope of Basel quite well, since he was none other than the former Duke of Savoy, with whom I had long had business relations. He was a pious and humble man who had abdicated in order to shut himself away in a monastery. Circumstances dictated that such peace would not be granted him. The delegates of the Council had come to drag him from his retreat and inform him that he was the pope. With him, at least, the position would be filled by a man of faith and great integrity. Charles saw him as a lesser evil and I agreed with him, all the more so in that at the time the pope in Rome had neither scruples nor morals. Nevertheless, in our Italian affairs, between northern Italy where France sought to play a role, and the kingdom of Naples, which had been lost by the Angevins, it was absolutely essential to consolidate the power of a pope over these states, and that this pope should be in our favor.

For all these reasons, the king opined, and I agreed with him, that it was time to finish once and for all with the Schism, and send the unfortunate duke who had become the antipope back to the monastery he should never have left. I attempted a first mission to Lausanne. The old duke wanted nothing more than to be persuaded, but he was surrounded by a court of canons and clerics who refused to listen. They were too gifted at scholastic controversy for me to attempt to confront them on their own terrain. I went home empty-handed.

But not long after that, the situation changed. A new Roman pontiff was elected, under the name of Nicholas V. He was a cultured and reasonable man. The majority of cardinals recognized his authority, while the Council of Basel had been discredited due to its stubbornness and excess. As a result of this election, Charles decided to act.

He ordered me to negotiate with the two popes once and for all, using all the financial means at my disposal to convince them. While I was attempting to bring this secret diplomacy to a successful conclusion, he would send an ordinary mission to Rome. Its purpose would be to greet the new sovereign pontiff and thus to let the world know where the king of France's preference lay. The antipope would understand that he had lost his most important support. To make the message clear and unambiguous, it was necessary to pull out all the stops. The mission to Rome must be brilliant: significant in size, a lavish display, an event to resonate all over Christendom. I would travel with the mission, and my primary role would be to ensure its desired brilliance.

 

*

 

Agnès was always sad to see me leave, and told me as much, but she had a very different reaction when she found out I was going to Rome. I knew her devotion, which she displayed through her luxurious offerings to her parishes. But I had been unaware of how genuine her faith was, and we had never spoken about it. Because of this pending mission, I discovered the depth of her piety. Agnès's religious fervor in no way resembled Macé's. There was no room for ostentation, even if her kindly deeds to the church, given her position at court, were public knowledge. The Collegiate Church at Loches had received several of her offerings, in particular a golden altarpiece, which contained a fragment of the True Cross brought back by the crusades.

Agnès took no pleasure in seeing her gestures made public, however. On the contrary, she made every effort to conceal the acts of charity or piety that she initiated. Prayer, for her, was a private affair. It was an opportunity for her to allow her pain, remorse, and sorrow to surface. I found this out later. But the moment she left behind her private meetings with God, alone or at the private masses where no one else took part, she came back to the court and was gay and in a good mood. Unlike Macé, she fled from the company of sinister prelates, and went as little as possible to high mass.

When she found out I was going to see the new pope, she entrusted me, blushing, with a private mission. She made her request in the presence of the king, so that he would know what she had asked me to do. But as we had the opportunity shortly thereafter to meet for three long days at Bois-Sir-Amé, she subsequently explained her reasons to me, once we were alone.

Agnès's goal was straightforward: she wanted to obtain from the Pope the right to own a portable altar. Such an instrument, with all its accessories—ciborium, patera, cruet, and so on—makes it possible for the believer to celebrate mass outside of a consecrated building. As always with Agnès, this request was proof of both immense pride and great modesty. It required great boldness for a young girl twenty-four years of age, whose only eminence was the fact she was the mistress of the king, to solicit a favor to which only high notables had been hitherto entitled. But this was not for appearance's sake, far from it. Agnès did not want anyone to know about this favor, if it was granted to her. On the contrary, it would enable her to practice her faith in a more complete withdrawal from the world.

When we were alone, I questioned her further about these practices. They were so foreign to me that I found it impossible to believe they were sincere. I was particularly eager to understand. Agnès lived in such obvious sin, and seemed to take a great deal of liberty with her body, as well as partaking in affectionate relations like our own, something which the Church would have found difficult to define, let alone condone: how could she embrace the rituals of a religion whose principles she so rarely obeyed? So, over two long evenings, sitting side by side, our legs entwined and my arm around her shoulder, we spoke about God.

Far from contradicting her, let alone making fun of her, I listened at length to her reasons for believing, or, rather, I was given the proof that she was inhabited by faith of the sort which knows no reason and which even goes against all reason. Christ, for her, was a sort of companion who protected her and called to her in his martyrdom. Whence the blend in her character of insouciance and tragedy, of an unprecedented gift for the joy of the moment and the resigned certainty that fate would grant her only the smallest of favors. Jesus put her to the test, then helped her to find joy in her pain.

This was also the first time that we spoke openly about her feelings for the king. She had been brought before him by the Anjou clan, and had felt immense horror at being handed over to such an individual. Everything about him was repulsive. His appearance repelled her: the big sleeves that hid his shoulders were too narrow, and his tights were often dirty and emphasized the deformity of his legs. She did not like his manners or his ideas. His voice and even his breathing, when he dozed off, filled her with violent aversion of an almost animal nature. And yet, she did not rebel. She called to Jesus, for hours on end, to give her the strength to face the ordeal He had set before her. And it was during that time that she felt closest to Him, the Crucified. He listened to her, consoled her, and gently showed her the way to a sort of resurrection.

If she had learned to live with Charles, it was because Christ had given her the strength to overcome her disgust, to drown her aversion in the cheer of festivities, to delude her repulsion with the help of a great deal of perfume and priceless fabrics. So much effort had to go into it. In the beginning, beneath the sweet sauce Agnès could still taste the bitterness of the dish. And yet, gradually, the miracle came about. Beneath the twin influences of his love and his armies' victories, Charles changed. To be sure, she was under no illusion, any more than I was, that beneath his new appearance the same man continued to exist. But at least life with him was becoming more bearable. And she rendered thanks to God for this transformation. At last she had understood the words of her confessor, to whom she had been careful never to divulge her most secret thoughts: salvation comes through the trials sent to us by the Lord. This thought prevented her, should she ever be so tempted, from acting ungratefully toward her Creator. Christ had saved her, but she had no doubt, since He wanted what was good for her, that He would send her further trials. So she continued to nourish a generous fear, the certainty that she was in imminent danger, and the hope that Christ would help her to overcome any new obstacles along the path to wisdom and salvation.

With the king's transformation, her fear changed in nature. In the beginning Agnès feared his presence, and dreaded that the situation fate had imposed on her would last for a very long time. Then she was afraid of the contrary: that he would abruptly cast her off, a fear she had shared with me in private at Beauté. Now that the Anjou clan had been eliminated, her fears were more diffuse, but just as strong. Now I know that she had a premonition of her fate.

I confess that at the time I did not fully understand her fears. They seemed to stem from a worldview that was not very Christian. Everything Agnès saw was a sign, and only had meaning in another reality known to her alone. For example, as I have said, she identified me as a sort of twin in the world of her dreams or of her origins. On the other hand, some people were bearers of curses, by virtue of the role they played in the invisible. These ideas could have led her to madness but, oddly enough, on the contrary, they gave her great strength and cunning. Certain people she was wary of, others she trusted; she protected herself from the former and opened her heart to the latter, guided by her intuition and memories. However astonishing it might seem, she was rarely mistaken.