The Cellars of Notre Dame

by Barbara Frale

  There was intense satisfaction in the gaze of the sovereign at having finally found someone who was able to look behind the appearances and discern the real nature of the problem. Satisfaction and even a touch of gratitude.

  Philip IV nodded. “At that point it might become difficult to define who the sovereign in France is. To establish who is actually in command.”

  Ever more confused but also impressed by the subtlety of the king’s thinking, Matilda reflected upon what she had learned until finally she realized what the aim of her cousin’s singular strategy was.

  “So that’s why you stand here so impassive in the window?” she asked anxiously. “To let your brother Luigi decide for you and lead the discussion. That way he will be able to satisfy his taste for power without entering into open competition with you and without wishing to take your throne!”

  Philip IV’s face was melancholy.

  “Actually, I am observing him,” he said, looking at his half-brother. “The more I hear him speak, the more I realize he is not cut out to be king. He immediately allowed himself to be forced into a minority by the others. His pitiful lie about that was born of good intentions but it turned out to be fatal: he only managed to make himself look foolish. Poor Luigi, he leaves me no choice! The crown is a weight that I will have to carry on my shoulders for a long time. Only death can free me of it, God willing.”

  The way he said it, which made it sound as though he viewed the end as a relief, moved the heart of the countess and made her tremble with fear. “Don’t talk like that!” she pleaded. “There must be something that can be done to get out of this awful situation!”

  Philip IV stared intently at his cousin. A complicit silence had fallen between them as they stood one in front of the other, allies in the same war.

  “There is always a way, Matilda,” murmured the sovereign, “but sometimes it is necessary to do evil to obtain a greater good. And there is no greater good for me than the good of my country.”

  The Countess gazed at him with worshipping eyes. When he spoke to her so intimately, Matilda suddenly forgot all her hesitations and the bitter of doubt that made her toss and turn in bed during her sleepless nights.

  “That’s why I admire you so much, Your Majesty,” she said in a whisper. “I’m completely yours. In my body and in my soul!” The king nodded, pleased by her docility, upon which he was sure he could count, and he rewarded it by granting her the hint of a smile. They were very few on the face of the earth who were able to say that they had seen those lips, always locked in that bitter half-scowl, opening slightly and softening for them.

  “We must see each other alone,” he whispered softly. “I need you, my cousin. I need you, Matilda!”

  II

  With that ingratiating smile of hers, the viscountess of Hesdin wanted to appear kind, but in reality her long face oozed the subtle and hateful hypocrisy to which courtiers of consummate skill are accustomed. And yet she hadn’t been at the Louvre for so long! Three years before, when she had arrived in Paris, she had looked like a rough, hirsute peasant woman; Matilda of Artois had made the task of cleaning her up and instructing her in the difficult art of lying stylishly a personal mission; satisfied with the result, she had chosen her as her first lady in waiting. Thanks to that rapid but effective training, the viscountess now displayed to the queen an expression of false embarrassment which was ideal for making her suspicious and provoking her disdain.

  “I said that I must see the Countess of Artois,” the queen insisted peremptorily. “It is urgent.”

  “I am sorry, your highness. I don’t have permission to let anyone go inside.”

  “Why? Is Matilda taking a bath?”

  The lady gave a Mephistophelian smile. “No, your highness. But I fear that she may be undressed…”

  Given her allusive tone, it was evident that the Countess was receiving a lover, since her husband was in the north on behalf of the sovereign. And what if by chance the sovereign had sent him on purpose on a mission to get him out from under his feet so he could enjoy his wife?

  A blush spread over Joan’s pale face. “It doesn’t matter if she’s naked,” she protested. “I am a woman like she.”

  At that point, Hesdin clasped both hands to her chest in a highly dramatic pose.

  “No, Madame, I beg you! You see, the lady countess is not alone. And the person who is with her in her bedroom has such authority, such a rank that…”

  “He cannot have a rank higher than mine,” said Joan. “I am the queen of France!”

  Madame Hesdin did not say a word, but her wicked, perverse little eyes and her lips, parted as if to holding back some obvious truth that nevertheless she seemed unwilling to pronounce even if threatened with death gave Joan a very clear message: she was deeply wrong . Although she was queen of France, the person who was in the room with Matilda possessed a dignity undoubtedly superior to hers. And only one individual in all of France could make such a claim: the king.

  Anger multiplies the strength a hundredfold and annihilates the faculty of reasoning. With a brusque gesture, Joan freed her path by shoving the viscountess against the wall; bruised by the impact, in spite of everything the lady maintained the irritating little grin of malign satisfaction on her face.

  Joan almost ran down the corridor to the bridal chamber with a storm in her chest that covered her face with tears and filled her heart with curses. She arrived at the closed door ready to beat upon it with her fists, even to smash it down, if necessary.

  And then, suddenly, she realized how uncomfortable her position was. What would she do in front of the image of them both naked in bed, perhaps already engaged in intercourse?

  She felt a furious urge to sink her nails into Matilda’s face. Without a hint of remorse, she would have scratched her eyes out – those eyes, so intense and intriguing that they bewitched all who saw them. But what about him? How would she react to gaze? Did she really want to face the pain, the humiliation, the contempt he would pour on her when he saw how ridiculous she had made herself by trying to catch them ?

  No, Joan couldn’t do it. She leant against the wooden door, closed her eyes, and prayed desperately. Perhaps some voice from Heaven would help her. That moment of total discouragement somehow managed to spark a glimmer of lucidity, and her thoughts began to return to safer, more reliable routes.

  It seemed unlikely that Philip would be so careless as to come in daylight to the palace of the Count of Artois to fuck his wife. Such a foolish, risky a way of doing things was decidedly not his style. But what else should she have thought?

  The queen put her ear to the door. She could distinctly hear the king’s voice, but he didn’t seem to be involved in emotional excesses of any kind. He sounded cold, rational and pragmatic, and the timbre recalled a perfectly tuned instrument. One would have said that he was dictating a letter to one of his secretaries, or perhaps discussing a battle plan. Slowly, and increasingly curious, Joan bent down to peer through the keyhole.

  She saw the airy space of the stately room and the large bed adorned with heavy drapes of red silk, and her heart took wing when she saw that it was not unmade and that the covers were as perfectly smooth as the hand of an impeccable servant had left them. In front of the window, taking advantage of the weak light of that winter morning, Philip IV and the Countess of Artois sat facing each other, he swathed in his sumptuous royal clothes, she clad in an emerald silk dress that highlighted the green of her eyes. There was a chessboard between them, upon which some pieces had already been moved. It did not seem that it was the game that occupied them, however, but rather the topic of conversation.

  “The Pope is prone to excommunications,” the king said.

  There was a breath of furious sadness in his voice. Something had hurt him deeply, undermining the immense self-control that usually made him such a formidable adversary; and Matilda wanted to take advantage of that momentary weakness.

  Sweetly and exuding human understanding, she posed
as a magnificent prey while in reality she was as lethal as some panther preparing an ambush.

  “Majesty, it would be different if your wife gave you the support she should. But Joan cannot understand! She’s not French. He doesn’t know how much we love our sacred homeland – love it so much that we would make the ultimate sacrifice to save it!”

  From there, the astute countess had embarked on a long and roundabout discourse, insinuating that Philip IV had committed a mortal error by marrying a foreigner. The courtiers praised Joan’s ethereal grace, which made her look like some colourful butterfly, but for the same reason they pitied her, because the fragility of those transparent air creatures, who die when their iridescent wings are touched, is proverbial.

  But none of them had realized her real nature: her wings were made of steel, and whoever presumed to touch them would end up breaking their fingers. The young heir to the throne of France was not her only victim, but he was certainly the most illustrious one. By swearing eternal love and perpetual loyalty, she had been able to lure him in and imprison him. She had besieged him with her implacable spider’s patience, had clung to him like a tenacious ivy that grows as one watches, until she had almost suffocated him with the false tenderness of her enterprising little leaves.

  And what should he do now if not seek a more devoted and respectful companion?

  While Philip IV listened in silence to Matilda’s stupendous tirade, his expression was one of vaguely gratified blankness. He certainly seemed to approve of the portrait of his wife that the countess painted behind closed doors: that of a woman who was very skilled at passing herself off as a victim but capable of refined, tortuous strategies when she felt it was necessary. The ruler seemed to nod, but only God Almighty could have said what the colour of his thoughts was at that moment.

  “Arnaldo da Villanova,” the king murmured, breaking his silent reflections.

  Matilda felt disappointment; she would have liked the conversation to remain on the exquisitely personal and private subjects of which she had been speaking.

  “Why is he so important, sire? You speak to me of him with a grave tone more suited to speaking of war.”

  “And that is precisely what might happen.”

  “My God! But he’s just an old scholar… Why does he have so much power, sire?”

  “There are various reasons. At the moment, the most urgent concerns a medical theory. A lesson that the old man was supposed to give at the Sorbonne two years ago.”

  “A lesson? About what?”

  “The demonstration that men who have committed sodomy are capable of generating healthy children who are able to survive their infancy.”

  The countess seemed puzzled.

  “Arnaldo da Villanova…” she murmured. “I remember him. He enjoyed a great reputation among the doctors of Paris. But what makes you think that the College of Arts would have accepted his theory? It just a theory after all. And one that went against the traditions of the Church, too.”

  Philip IV raised an eyebrow slightly.

  “There was a specific agreement behind it, of course,” he said. “All of the most accredited doctors of College of Arts, starting with my surgeon Enrico Mondeville, would have accepted Arnaldo’s thesis. They could not have refused. And moreover, the Catalan would have given convincing proof.”

  “Convincing proof, Your Majesty. Why do you take it for granted that the Church too would have accepted them?”

  Philip IV indulged in a barely perceptible movement of the lips; something that, in his minimalist approach to facial expressions, represented a smile.

  “The Sorbonne theologians were ready to accept it too,” he said. “The rector swore unconditional loyalty to me, and he would have confirmed the theory on the basis of an incontrovertible argument.”

  “What argument, if I may ask?”

  “It concerns the biblical personage Lot,” said the king. “This nephew of Abraham grew up in Sodom, where certain practices were not considered a sin. And yet he generated perfect healthy daughters.”

  Matilda d’Artois’ pale eyes opened wide with admiration.

  “Brilliant, sire! No one can contest the truth of something which comes from the Holy Scriptures. But forgive me… what has all this to do with you?”

  The king frowned and looked away into space, and then slowly, with allusive yet eloquent words, he led her to the heart of the problem.

  A year before he came into the world, he explained, a certain knight of the Franche-Comté had come to Paris, a fief of the Empire. His name was Gauvain de Longwy, and he was beautiful; tall, blond, with brooding intense blue eyes that made women’s heads turn. At that time, King Philip III had already been accused of entertaining intimate relationships with his chamberlain, Pierre de la Brosse; a great man, Brosse, who, though, had had the foolish idea of falling in love with the king and enjoying unnatural pleasures with him.

  Poor Queen Isabella of Aragon, alone at night more and more often and as beautiful as a rose in May, attracted the attention and care of the Knight of Longwy, so they said, and months later, she brought this wonderful child into the world. Blond, and with eyes of that same blue, so rare that it borders on violet.

  Frozen as she was with shock, Matilda somehow found the courage to rebel against that atrocious idea.

  “But sire, even St. Elizabeth of Hungary had eyes like you, and she was your grandmother’s sister. You have Slavic blood in your veins, who knows how many of your ancestors had eyes of the same colour!”

  “Of course,” thought Joan, eavesdropping from behind the door, “but the French are ignorant of this detail. Monsignor Saisset knows it and takes advantage of it, and he has every opportunity to spread the word that the king is not the legitimate son of Philip III…”

  Here is what happened, then! Her husband had worked shrewdly to surmount that obstacle and had managed to foster the loyalty of the most respected intellectuals in France, even obtaining the approval of the Sorbonne theologians… But that essential test, the proof that Arnaldo the Catalan was to provide, was still lacking.

  Joan squeezed her right hand into a fist and bit her index finger to try and snap herself out of her indecision. What should she do at that point? Barge her way into the room and surprise them?

  Philip had not made the slightest mention of that atrocious affair to her, who was his wife, while he opened up about it with the Countess of Artois, and probably asked her for help. It was a betrayal, even if it did not involve the bed. But perhaps this kind of complicity was even more serious than lovemaking.

  Feeling that her heart risked bursting with anger, she took a deep breath to calm herself. She imagined that she was no longer herself but another person, a woman completely extraneous to that situation who had been called to look at the facts from behind the transparent shield of indifference and to judge them for exactly what they were.

  First: Philip had gone to Matilda in the robes he wore for official ceremonies with foreign delegates. On the ring finger of his right hand he wore the royal ring with the very rare two-coloured diamond, the most symbolic and representative emblem of his special dignity. That is, he presented himself to the Countess as her sovereign and his lord, so he was not asking for help on an equal footing: whatever he wanted from her, it was implied that Matilda owed it to him by virtue of the feudal oath. And in truth, the scene didn’t actually look at all like some amorous request…

  No, the truth was another: ruling the richest and most strategic feud of the kingdom, the Countess of Artois could keep all the other vassals – who would never dare stand up and risk being crushed between being the army of Artois and that of France – obedient and devoted.

  Perhaps Matilda had not grasped the meanings subtly hidden in the secret language with which the king communicated to other – or at least to those capable of understanding him – his feelings on particularly sensitive matters. The shrewd countess should be careful: when events had him in a corner, he defended himself in the only way th
at life had taught him: by engaging his uncommon intellectual resources in search of the quickest way out of danger. And when that happened, his loves or passions ceased to matter and Philip IV turned into a fearsome machine of death. The dreaded Panther of Artois would find herself facing a beast even more ferocious than she.

  The timing of events, above all, guided Joan’s mind towards a definite suspicion. For weeks the behaviour of her husband had been so detached that he had barely spoken to her and had been doing everything possible to avoid her even in the corridors of the Louvre; for weeks he had been struggling with that secret anguish about his nominal father actually being a man many believed incapable of generating healthy children.

  What if the ghost that tormented him was fear?

  What if by chance he had kept his distance from her because he was ashamed of himself? Because he feared that Joan, who was unquestionably the niece of Louis XI, might consider him a man of bad blood, and thus unworthy of her?

  If that was the case, the distance he had imposed between them was not a vendetta against a disobedient wife but an act of prudence to avert the intolerable pain of being scorned.

  Was that really possible? Did he believe that she loved only him for the crown he wore on his head and for the cloak studded with gold lilies?

  Even when, after years of marriage, they passed one another in some hall of the palace with their respective retinues of dignitaries, she still had to hold her breath for a few moments and beg God not to judge her for the immodest thoughts that erupted within her imagination just at the sight of him.

  Each time, she blanched and felt her insides moan with desire, because she could not help but imagine the perfection of his naked body. Was it possible that he didn’t realize it?

  But then, even the most intelligent individuals, even the most brilliant ones, become insecure to the point of stupidity when faced with situations which make their most solid certainties tremble and quake. He had the odious habit of making himself elusive and even hostile when he felt that he was in serious danger – that instinct of the wild beast, which wants to die alone in some dark corner. He was incapable of asking for help or even of expressing his weaknesses; perhaps because during his unhappy childhood, studded with traumas that would have been the end of anyone else, no one had ever given him a helping hand. And even now he continued to see himself in that way – as a boy threatened by a thousand threats lurking in the shadows who either gets out of trouble by himself or succumbs.