The Cellars of Notre Dame

by Barbara Frale

  “It is not strange, your worship. Not after what we knew. I implored Ottone da Sermoneta to do a search for me, and a great many privileges and indulgences granted to this la Brosse emerged from the papal registers. He was a nobleman from Touraine, a great friend of King Louis the Holy. For the trust that the sovereign placed in him, he was appointed guide and mentor of the young Philip III. From there la Brosse became chamberlain, then even Philip III’s personal secretary. And then the idyll ended. Brosse was sentenced to death by hanging in 1278.”

  Duraguerra was shocked.

  “What do you mean, hanging? A noble of that rank has the right to be beheaded.”

  “Not if the accusation is that you have betrayed your king. Which in fact is what la Brosse was accused of.”

  “Did he conspire against Philip III?”

  The cardinal’s question was pertinent, but Crescenzio shook his head with a hint of disappointment.

  “No. It was a private betrayal. It seems that there was an intrigue in the royal palace. La Brosse had fallen in love with Queen Marie of Brabant, the king’s second wife. And he had tried to seduce her.”

  “Good grief!” cried Duraguerra. “So it’s about betrayal, then. A very bad business. Even more odious when the trouble involves a reigning house.”

  “Your worship, it seemed to us that Valois felt intense shame when the pope named that man. Our conjectures would fully explain the prince’s discomfort: for heaven’s sake, the honour of his late father was offended! But at this point, the whole affair became clear. Philip IV’s anger, the fear that his terrible secret would be discovered, his father’s wife being unfaithful to him. But…”

  “But it doesn’t hold water,” Duraguerra cut in. “The king of France might be ashamed of his father, but he cannot be ashamed of himself. He was born of Isabella of Aragon, Philip III’s first wife. What does the second wife Marie of Brabant have to do with it?

  Crescenzio spread his arms and let them fall back down by his sides in a gesture of frustration.

  “Exactly, your worship! I’m afraid that Paray told us a lie. Or perhaps only a part of the truth. But without wishing to, he may have put us on the right track in any case. Can you help us?”

  The muscles of Duraguerra’s face contracted, and his eyes grew dark.

  “I disliked that man right from the off,” he said. “As soon as he set foot in the library, I asked him if we didn’t already know each other. He ruled out the possibility. Yet I have already seen him here, I’m sure of it.”

  Dante and Crescenzio were struck by his outburst and immediately exchanged a glance.

  “So the prior of Paray came to the library?” asked Crescenzio.

  “The day before yesterday,” Duraguerra confirmed.

  “For what purpose, if I may ask?” said Dante. “He told me that the king of France had asked him to carry out heraldic research.”

  “Precisely that,” the cardinal asserted. “Philip IV asked him to collect documents capable of proving that his lineage descends from Charlemagne. But the prior must be inept, because in reality he did nothing but ask to see the diplomas of the Byzantine emperors. And I even had to find him an Apulian cleric to read the Greek to him.”

  Again Dante and Crescenzio exchanged a mute look.

  “Therefore Philip IV wants to give historical substance to the nobility of his blood,” said Crescenzio.

  “It must be a family obsession,” said the cardinal. “His father Philip III was obsessed with pure blood too. Which is pretty rich, when everyone knows that the founder of their dynasty was the son of a butcher!”

  Duraguerra knew enough about how the world worked to not think this fact exceptional. The other two, instead, looked stunned.

  “Didn’t you know? Ugo Capeto had humble origins. First, he became count of Paris, then gradually his prestige and power grew. The fact is that his descendants are not ignorant of these truths, so they are very touchy when it comes to the nobility of their origins. Some time ago, I gave orders to bind certain files that contained the minutes of letters sent twenty years ago. Amongst them there was also a solemn plea, which even bore the gold seal of the kings of France. It belonged to Philip III and asked for a marriage dispensation so that his son Philip could marry the young Matilda, since they are cousins.”

  “That is the Countess of Artois?”

  “Exactly, my son. She was destined to marry the heir to the throne of France. Nothing ever came of it, but Philip III wrote that plea because his son was to marry her. And the reason I remember it well is that I was struck by a singular expression placed on the ablative case: . Matilda’s family in fact descends without any doubt from Charlemagne; if born of her, the future sovereigns of France would have had pure blood in their veins.”

  “But the prince did not marry Matilda,” observed Dante.

  “He married Joan of Navarre,” Crescenzio echoed. “For some reason, he gave up that ‘pure blood’. Only now he wants it anyway, so he unleashes this Paray in search of evidence…”

  The bells rang out Vespers and Duraguerra gestured to the scholars to rise from their benches; sunset was approaching and the Chancellery was about to close its doors. Crescenzio strode towards the staircase that led to the courtyard. All in all, he had learned more than he had at first hoped.

  “We should write a summary to show to the Pope,” suggested Dante, trudging after him.

  Lost in his thoughts, the other did not answer.

  “Did you hear me? We made a great discovery today!”

  “Which one, Dante? That the kings of France are not actually descended from Charlemagne? What a surprise!”

  “That the kings of France have serious doubts about their origins,” observed Alighieri. “And Arnaldo da Villanova knows dirty secrets about the royal family. About the mother and father of Philip IV. Perhaps the king cares so much about getting the Catalan back because the old man has in his possession something that demonstrates the illegitimacy of the sovereign’s birth. Whatever could it be? How I would love to know!”

  “A beautiful hypothesis, Dante, but based on nothing. Without certain proof, it is all only so much air!”

  And without adding a word more, he walked off, leaving Dante standing there feeling somewhat offended. He could not have imagined that in reality Crescenzio was profoundly grateful to him for his help; it was just that he wanted to free himself of the Florentine quickly, because night was falling and he had a very urgent appointment that he didn’t want to miss – even at the risk of getting stuck with a sword.

  IV

  The girl cried out. Not a sweet lament like usual; this time the pleasure was so intense that it made her head spin.

  Her lover jumped up onto his knees on the bed. He had removed himself from the uncomfortable position he had occupied until then, all intent upon venerating the body of his beloved and reserving for her a certain practice that the Penitential books considered forbidden even between husband and wife.

  Kneeling there in front of her, he stared at her in alarm.

  “Quiet down! Don’t scream so loud. If they discover us, your uncle’s servants will kill me and throw me into the Tiber!”

  Immacolata threw back her dishevelled blonde hair and allowed herself a liberating laugh. Her body felt light, her head seemed to be floating in the clouds and her mouth tingled. Seeing her like this, naked and sweating between the sheets, with her legs still shamelessly parted, she looked like some icon of profane love.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, raising herself on her elbows. “I couldn’t help it.”

  Her lover sensed a certain mischievousness in her words, and the maggot of jealousy came at him from behind like an arrow.

  “You did it on purpose,” he hissed resentfully, “you want us to be found out so that your uncle will finally decide to marry you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Go on, admit it!”

  Immacolata Colonna had no experience with men, but even she had to admit that there was something genuinely ambiguo
us about her current situation. Daughter of Ottone Colonna, exiled by Boniface like all those of his family for having questioned the legitimacy of his pontificate, she had remained in Rome at the home of her mother’s brother, the nobleman Gregorio Conti. To whom she had been betrothed. Love, however, is blind, unfortunately, and upon meeting Crescenzio Caetani, grand-nephew of his family’s most bitter enemy, months before, Immacolata had fallen fervently, passionately in love with him, and he with her. The marriage with her uncle had gone up in smoke, as had the possibility of obtaining from Boniface VIII the consent to be able to attend Crescenzio. Immacolata had been confined to Palazzo Conti under house arrest, from which she was permitted to exempt herself only the bare minimum necessary to go to church; every cloud has a silver lining, though, the two lovers thought. The palazzo in fact stood on the bank of the Tiber overlooking Castel Sant’Angelo, home of the noble family of the Orsini, Crescenzio’s relatives through his maternal bloodline.

  For months now the two had been seeing each other at night in furtive embraces by the magical light of the moon, torn from the few hours of darkness. Crescenzio jumped into a boat, climbed over the wall of the garden of Palazzo Conti and ascended a high climbing vine that led to the open gallery from which he could access her room. And there, with the door closed, they could forget the rest of the world.

  They had never really made love, though. As a doctor, and a doctor of no small skill, he knew very well that it was all too easy to check whether a woman’s hymen had been violated. And that there was no safe way apart from chastity to avoid pregnancies. Though sinful in the eyes of the moral law, passionate kisses and intimate caresses could in no way compromise Immacolata’s body. As long as she remained a virgin, she was safe from revenge, but if by chance they discovered that she had become pregnant, the Colonnas would have been quite capable of killing her without mercy.

  For months Crescenzio had been content to venerate her as if she were an idol, dedicating to her and to their passion a cult of loving renunciation. Anything just to know she was safe. But was she safe from Gregorio Conti? And what if Conti took the virginity that Crescenzio had so long respected like the most precious of treasures?

  The thought alone filled his blood with gall, depriving him of his reason and his emotions.

  Immacolata stared at him in astonishment. As enraged as a beast, Crescenzio was the only man she had known intimately, though without breaking the seal of her virginity. Something deep in her soul told her that he would be the only one in her life who would be capable of making her feel certain things.

  She knew nothing of the male world except what she had heard whispered by other women far more experienced than she: a lover should be made and kept jealous, always. You should never let that red-hot iron cool down; on the contrary, you should beat it for as long as it was still hot. A jealous lover will never leave you.

  “Gregory became obsessive,” she murmured, feigning embarrassment. “He has me spied upon. He watches everything I do…”

  Kneeling on the bed in front of her, her lover looked as if was about to explode.

  “If he dares so much as touch you, I swear to God that I will gut him!”

  Immacolata covered her mouth with her hand to hide her laughter. She might not know anything about men, but an instinct as ancient as the world told her what she had to do at that moment. She took her young lover by the hand – or rather by the handle, which, despite his jealous wrath, stood as firm and erect as it had before they had interrupted their erotic play, and pulled him towards her to give a worthy conclusion to the work of Venus that they had so gloriously begun.

  *

  Later, when they were satiated in both body and heart, she remembered an important fact that in the heat of desire she had overlooked .

  “I was forgetting about the letter,” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright on the bed.

  “What letter?” he asked.

  “You asked me to write to my Uncle Egidio weeks ago. He answered me. The letter arrived yesterday.”

  This time it was Crescenzio who sat bolt upright. It had never really occurred to him that his idea, which he knew had little real hope of success, might instead achieve a result.

  “Did you really write to Egidio Colonna? The tutor of the king of France?”

  “And who if not him?” she laughed, giving him an affectionate slap around the head.

  Ignoring the cold air that bit at her beautiful bare skin, she got up from the bed, opened a casket and handed it to him. By the dim light of the candle, Crescenzio began to read.

  Darling Immacolata,

  I received your letter and hastened to write to you: given the matter of which you ask me, and especially considering that your letter came to me inside another envelope bearing the seal of Cardinal Lemoine, I realize that it must be a question of the utmost gravity, and that what you are forwarding me are probably the requests of the most eminent father himself.

  Tell him that His Majesty has never entrusted me with any confidences upon the subject that interests you; and this is good thing, dear child, because if he had spoken to me in any way, I would never have dared break the secret of confession.

  All that I will now tell you, remember, therefore belongs to my conjectures; but because of many clues of which I cannot speak, I have reason to believe that my conjectures are true.

  Years ago, during one of our conversations, King Philip IV mentioned to me in a very laconic way a certain secret that was kept by the Grand Master of the Templars, friar Jacques de Molay; foolishly I think I smiled and commented that it did not seem strange to me, since the Templars, as everyone knows, keep many secrets about the various kingdoms of the Christian world. I remember that the king’s face grew gloomy; he replied caustically that it was not a political secret, but rather a sensitive matter concerning his family.

  Then, half-serious and half-facetious but with that ambiguous way of joking of his in which a veiled threat always seems to lurk, he pointed out to me that Brother Molay resembled him; he was clearly not at all happy about the fact.

  I realized that this secret must be greatly upsetting to him, even though he tried to maintain that patina of Olympian serenity which I myself, as his tutor, taught him to adopt, because a sovereign must take care to hide his thoughts. I told him he could rest easy; no one would ever know anything about the matter, since the Templars are famous for the fidelity with which they keep the most confidential information.

  I saw a flash of terror in the eyes of the king. For all the years I educated him, I had been convinced that nothing in the world could actually frighten him. At that moment, he told me he wasn’t worried about the Templars; Arnaldo da Villanova also knew the same secret, and he feared that he might divulge it purely out of a desire to revenge himself against him.

  As for the man of whom you ask me, that Pierre de la Brosse, I must tell you that in Paris his name can only be whispered. I know in fact that he was involved in a conspiracy against King Philip III in the year 1278, or so. Brosse was the king’s secretary, but his intimacy with the sovereign went far beyond being some mere servant. Only the Lord can separate the wheat from the chaff and the true from the false, so therefore I will limit myself to enumerating the facts: the firstborn son of Philip the Bold, Prince Louis, suddenly died only a few days after the sovereign’s second wife, Marie of Brabant, had given birth to a boy. De la Brosse accused Queen Marie of Brabant of having poisoned the heir to the throne, and said that with the help of her courtiers she intended to eliminate all the children of Queen Isabella of Aragon, the main dynastic line of France. This, of course, to ensure that one day the male son to whom she had just given birth, who today is Prince Louis of Évreux, became sovereign

  But Queen Marie had influential friends on her side and these included the very powerful Arnulfo de Wissenmal, the Great Preceptor of the Templars in France, a man able to manipulate the vital nerves of the kingdom, and who to boot was a native of Brabant like her. Pier de la Brosse was firs
t accused of seducing the queen, but the accusation could not hold: everyone in the Louvre knew that the man was addicted to unnatural pleasures and for a long time had been involved in an unseemly relationship with Philip III.

  The scandal threatened to engulf the royal house, because the Church believes, on the basis of incontrovertible authorities, that men who indulge in sodomy are not able to generate healthy children. As Albertus Magnus writes, and Pier Damiani before him, nothing good can survive if the seed is infected by that perversity: theologians would have argued that the heir, now King Philip IV, could not really be the son of Philip III , because in that case he would have died immediately after birth. All the sons of Philip III risked being called bastards. The succession to the throne would have been compromised, and the Capetian dynasty interrupted. It was a catastrophe that the kingdom could not have survived.

  Friar Arnulfo de Wissenmal forced the king to take an extreme decision: to sentence Pier de la Brosse to death. Only in this way would the rumours about the sovereign’s sodomy be suppressed, because the sentence would demonstrate clearly that there was no amorous relationship between them. Only in this way could the king save his descendants. And so that is what Philip III did.

  I know nothing else.

  I hope that my words can be useful to you and to Cardinal Lemoine, but also to His Holiness, who, as you inform me, finds himself in an uncomfortable situation. If you have the opportunity to do so, dear nephew, assure him of my loyalty as a devoted servant to the supreme Roman pontiff, and tell him that I pray incessantly for almighty God to put an end to the awful feud that divides our family from that of His Holiness.

  I embrace you, and invoke divine protection for you.

  †+ frater Egidius, ordinis sancti Augustini

  Crescenzio’s continued to stare at the letter, his expression so shocked that she became frightened.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, embracing him. In response, he folded the letter and began to dress. “Are you leaving so soon?” the girl whimpered.