The Royal Succession (3 page)

`But the King is dead, Messire de Joinville,' he replied, `And we buried him this morning. degYou 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, Clemence 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 Castille had assumed the Regency, to the satisfaction of all.

`Madame Blanche of Castille, 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.

Clemence was the first to give way.

`Very well, Uncle, so be it!' she said. `I will do as you wish and
return to the Cite.'

`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 Clemence on the verge of collapse. `But now, I ask you, please, let me pray.'

An hour later, the Count of Valois' orders had set the Chateau 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 tall; 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.

Clemence 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
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gilt goblets Louis had had made for Clemence, 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 us
e to me again?' said Clemence.

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.'

Clemence looked at the beautiful, fair woman who, forgetting all j
ealousy, had been of such great
help to her during the last months and particularly during Louis' 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' 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. Clemence 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 t
he 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 Dueze, 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, Dueze'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' 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 tenth 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 su
cceeded by a thirst for power.
Councillor to King Charles II of Anjou-Sicily (the grandfather of Queen Clemence), then Secretary to the Secret Councils and the holder of numerous ecclesiastical benefices, he had been appointed Bishop of Frejus 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 Dueze 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 b4 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. Dueze. This he did in 1
3
10, 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 quest. 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 Dueze
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 Dueze turned perforce to abstra
ct 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 Judgement. Yet God, who is perfect, cannot sit in appeal on His own judgements. 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 Judgement. 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.