The Poisoned Crown

by Maurice Druon

  ‘Please do nothing, Madam, I beseech you,’ cried Eudeline.

  ‘The King loads me with so many presents I don’t want! He can very well give me one I do!’

  ‘No, no, I beseech you, do nothing,’ repeated Eudeline. ‘I would rather see my daughter behind the veil than beneath the earth.’

  Clémence, for the first time since the beginning of their conversation, smiled, indeed she almost laughed.

  ‘Are people of your condition so frightened of the King in France? Or is it the memory of King Philip, who was said to be without mercy, which still weighs upon you?’

  If Eudeline had real affection for the Queen, she had a no less real grievance against The Hutin, and here was the opportunity to satisfy both these feelings at the same time.

  ‘You don’t yet know Monseigneur Louis as everyone here knows him; he hasn’t yet shown you the reverse of his character. No one has forgotten,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘that our Lord Louis tortured his household servants after the case against Madame Marguerite, and that eight corpses, all broken and mutilated, were fished out of the river at the foot of the Tower of Nesle. Do you think they were thrown into it by chance? I shouldn’t like chance to push my daughter and me in the same direction.’

  ‘That is merely gossip invented by the King’s enemies ...’

  But as she uttered the words, Clémence remembered the allusions made by Cardinal Duèze, and the way in which Bouville, on the Lyons road, had replied to her question concerning Marguerite’s death. Clémence recollected what her brother-in-law, Philippe of Poitiers, had let fall about the merciless tortures and unjust sentences suffered by Philip the Fair’s ex-ministers.

  ‘Have I married a cruel man?’ she wondered.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve said too much,’ Eudeline went on. ‘May God spare you hearing anything worse, and may your great goodness leave you in ignorance.’

  ‘What worse could I hear? ... Madame Marguerite ... is that true?’

  Eudeline sadly shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘You are the only person at Court, Madam, who has any doubt of it; if you haven’t yet been told of it, it is because some people are waiting till the moment’s ripe, perhaps, to injure you the more. He had her strangled, it’s well known.’

  ‘My God, my God, can it possibly be true? Can he possibly have committed murder in order to marry me?’ groaned Clémence, hiding her face in her hands.

  ‘Oh, don’t start weeping again, Madam,’ said Eudeline. ‘It will soon be supper-time, and you cannot appear thus. You must wash your face.’

  She went and fetched a basin of cold water and a looking-glass, dabbed wet towels on the Queen’s cheeks, and rearranged a blonde tress which had come loose. Her gestures had a curious gentleness, a sort of protective tenderness.

  For a moment the faces of the two women appeared side by side in the looking-glass, two faces of the same blonde complexion and golden hair, each with the same large blue eyes.

  ‘You know, we’re very much alike,’ said the Queen.

  ‘That is the finest compliment that has ever been paid me, and I only wish it were true,’ Eudeline replied.

  As they were both much moved, and were equally in need of friendship, the wife of King Louis X and his first mistress stood for a moment clasped in each other’s arms.

  5

  The Fork and the Prie-dieu

  HIS HEAD HELD HIGH, a smile on his lips, his feet in slippers, and wearing a fur-lined dressing-gown over his nightshirt, Louis X entered Clémence’s room.

  He had thought the Queen strangely silent during supper. She had been distant, absent almost, barely following the conversation and scarcely replying when spoken to. He had not, however, been unduly perturbed: ‘Women are moody creatures,’ he said to himself, ‘and the present I bought her this morning will restore her good humour.’ For The Hutin was one of those husbands who are so lacking in imagination and have so small an opinion of women, that they believe a present will solve anything. He therefore arrived, in as gracious a mood as he was able to assume, carrying a little oval jewel-case decorated with the Queen’s arms.

  He was somewhat surprised to find Clémence kneeling on her prie-dieu. She had generally said her evening prayers before he arrived. He signed to her with his hand, intending to indicate: ‘Don’t put yourself out for me, finish at your leisure.’ And he remained at the other end of the room, somewhat embarrassed, turning the jewel-case over in his hands.

  The minutes went by; he went and took a sweet from a jar by the bedside, and ate it. Clémence was still on her knees and Louis began to get bored with waiting. He went over to her, and saw that she was not in fact praying. She was looking at him.

  ‘Look, dearest,’ he said, ‘look at the surprise I’ve brought you. Oh, it’s not a jewel, but a curiosity, a rare piece of goldsmith’s work. Look!’

  He opened the case and took from it a long shining object with two points. Clémence, upon her prie-dieu, started back in fear.

  ‘Dearest!’ cried Louis, laughing, ‘don’t be frightened, this is no weapon for wounding; it’s a little fork to eat pears with. Look at the workmanship,’ he added, placing on the wooden back of the prie-dieu a fork with two sharp steel prongs set in a handle of ivory and chased gold.

  Louis was disappointed; the Queen seemed to show very little interest in his present, nor did she seem to appreciate its novelty.

  ‘I had it made specially,’ he went on, ‘through the good offices of Messire Tolomei, who ordered it directly from a Florentine goldsmith. There are apparently only five of these forks in the world, and I wanted you to have one so that you should not stain your pretty hands when you eat fruit. It’s particularly suitable for a lady; a man would never dare, nor indeed know how, to use so precious a tool, except my effeminate brother-in-law Edward of England who, I am told, possesses one and does not fear the mockery his using it at table arouses.’

  He had hoped to amuse her by telling her this anecdote, but the joke fell flat. Clémence neither moved from her prie-dieu nor took her eyes off him; never had she looked more beautiful, her long golden hair falling to her waist. Louis began to find himself at his wits’ end.

  ‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘Messire Tolomei has just told me that his young nephew, whom I sent with Bouville to fetch you from Naples, is now recovered. He will shortly be on his way to Paris and in every letter to his uncle speaks of your kindness to him.’

  ‘What can be the matter with her?’ he wondered. ‘She might at least have said thank you.’ With anyone else but Clémence he would have already lost his temper, but he could not as yet resign himself to having the first quarrel of their married life. He took it upon himself to make another effort.

  ‘I really believe that this time the affairs of Artois will be settled,’ he said. ‘I feel reasonably confident and things seem to be going well. The conference at Compiègne, to which you were kind enough to accompany me, has had the effect I expected and I shall soon summon my Grand Council in order to make my arbitration and seal the agreement between Mahaut and her barons.’

  ‘Louis,’ Clémence said suddenly, ‘how did your first wife die?’

  Louis leant forward, as if someone had hit him in the stomach, and gazed at her in momentary stupefaction.

  ‘She died,’ he said, ‘she died’ – and he waved his hands about – ‘she died of a pleurisy which choked her, or so I’m told.’

  ‘Louis, can you swear it before God?’

  ‘What do you want me to swear?’ said The Hutin, raising his voice. ‘There is no reason why I should swear anything. What are you getting at? What do you want to know? I have said what I have said, and I hope you will be content with that; there is nothing more you need know.’

  He was pacing up and down the room. At the opening of his nightshirt, the base of his neck had turned red; his huge pale eyes had suddenly become disquietingly bright.

  ‘I do not wish,’ he cried, ‘I do not wish her spoken of! Ever! And by you i
n particular. I forbid you, Clémence, ever to mention Marguerite’s name in my presence.’

  He was interrupted by a fit of coughing.

  ‘Can you swear to me before God,’ Clémence repeated in a voice that she had to make carry to the end of the room, ‘can you swear that you had no hand in her death?’

  With Louis anger soon clouded judgement. Instead of simply making a denial and pretending to laugh it off, he replied violently, ‘And what if it were true? You’re the last person to have any right to blame me. It was not my fault, it was the fault of Madame of Hungary!’

  ‘My grandmother?’ murmured Clémence. ‘What has my grandmother to do with it?’

  The Hutin realized at once that he had made a mistake, which served merely to increase his fury. But it was too late to turn back. He felt himself cornered.

  ‘Of course it was Madame of Hungary’s fault!’ he repeated. ‘She insisted that your marriage should take place before the summer. Therefore, I hoped – make no mistake about it, I only hoped – that Marguerite would die before then. I hoped it aloud, and I was heard, that’s all! If I had not expressed that hope, you would not today be Queen of France. So don’t pretend to be so innocent, and don’t throw the blame in my face for something that has turned out very well for you; it has raised you to a higher place than you could ever have hoped for.’

  ‘I would never have accepted it,’ cried Clémence, ‘if I had known that it was at such a cost. It is because of that crime, Louis, that God has not given us a child!’

  Louis turned about and stood rigid in astonishment.

  ‘Because of that crime, and of all the others you have committed,’ continued the Queen, rising from her prie-dieu. ‘You have had your wife murdered! On false evidence you have had Messire de Marigny hanged, and have thrown into prison your father’s ministers who, I am assured, were good servants. You have tortured those who displeased you. You have attacked the lives and liberties of God’s creatures. And that is why God is now punishing you by preventing you from fathering others.’

  Louis, horrified, watched her come towards him. There was thus a third person on the earth who was not terrified of his rages, who could stand four-square to his anger and take the upper hand. His father, Philip the Fair, had dominated him by his authority; his brother, the Count of Poitiers, dominated him through his intelligence; and here was his second wife dominating him through her faith.

  Never could he have believed that his judge would appear in the marriage chamber in the form of so beautiful a woman, her hair trailing behind her like a comet.

  Louis’s face crumpled; he looked like a child about to cry.

  ‘And what do you want me to do now?’ he asked in a shrill voice. ‘I can’t bring the dead back to life. You don’t know what it is to be a King! Nothing that has happened has been done altogether by my will and yet you blame me for everything. What do you expect to get by it? What’s the use of blaming me for things that cannot be undone? Leave me, go back to Naples, if you can’t stand the sight of me any longer. And wait till there’s a Pope, so that you can ask him to untie the knot that binds us! Oh, the Pope! The Pope they’ve never succeeded in making,’ he added, clenching his fists. ‘You don’t know how hard I tried! None of this would have happened if there had been a Pope.’

  Clémence placed her hands on his shoulders. She was a little taller than he was.

  ‘I would never think of leaving you,’ she said. ‘I am your wife to share your lot, your sorrows as well as your joys. What I desire is to save your soul, to inspire you with repentance, without which there is no forgiveness.’

  He gazed into her eyes, and saw there nothing but goodness of heart and a great strength of compassion. He felt relieved; he had been so frightened of losing her! And he drew her to him.

  ‘Dearest, dearest,’ he murmured, ‘you are better than I, oh how much better, and I don’t know how I should live without you. I promise to mend my ways and to repent of the harm of which I have been the cause.’

  As he spoke, he hid his head in the hollow of her shoulder and touched her neck lightly with his lips.

  ‘Oh, dearest,’ he went on, ‘how good you are! How wonderful you are to love! I promise I will be such as you would wish. Of course I have fits of remorse, and sometimes they terrify me! I can forget only when I am in your arms. Come, dearest, let’s make love.’

  He tried to lead her to the bed, but she stood still and he felt her grow rigid in refusal.

  ‘No, Louis, no,’ she said very softly. ‘We must do penance.’

  ‘But we will do penance, dearest; we’ll fast three times a week if you like. Come, I want you so badly!’

  She tore herself from his grasp and, as he tried to hold her by force, a seam of her nightdress gave way. The noise of its rending frightened Clémence who, covering her naked shoulder with her hand, ran to take refuge, to barricade herself behind the prie-dieu.

  Her gesture of timidity released The Hutin’s anger once more.

  ‘Really, what’s the matter with you?’ he cried. ‘And what must I do to please you?’

  ‘I don’t want to sleep with you again till we have been upon a pilgrimage to Monsieur Saint-Jean who has already saved me from the sea. And you will come with me, and we shall go on foot; then we shall know if God forgives us by giving us a child.’

  ‘The best pilgrimage we can make for the purpose of having a child is here!’ said Louis, indicating the bed.

  ‘Oh, don’t make a mock of religion,’ Clémence replied, ‘you won’t persuade me that way.’

  ‘Your religion is a very strange one if it commands you to refuse yourself to your husband. Have you never been told that there are certain duties from which you must not swerve?’

  ‘Louis, you don’t understand me!’

  ‘Yes, I do!’ he shouted. ‘I understand that you are refusing yourself to me. I understand that I no longer please you, that you are behaving towards me as did Marguerite ...’

  She saw his eyes fixed on the fork with its two long sharp points as it still lay upon the prie-dieu. And at that moment she really felt afraid. She slowly put out her hand to take it before he did so himself. But, luckily, he did not notice her gesture. He was only thinking of the overwhelming panic, the appalling despair in which he was submerged.

  Louis was never certain of his potency except in contact with a docile body. Not to be wanted, not to be suffered, destroyed his powers; the tragedy of his first marriage had no other origin but this. Supposing this infirmity attacked him again? There is no greater anguish than being unable to possess the person one most desires. How could he explain to Clémence that, for him, the punishment had preceded the crime? He was terrified at the idea that the appalling cycle of refusal, impotence, and hatred was about to begin all over again. He muttered, as if to himself, ‘Am I damned and accursed not to be able to be loved by those I love?’

  Then, yielding to pity as much as to fear, Clémence left the protection of the prie-dieu, and said, ‘Very well, I do as you wish.’ She went to snuff the candle.

  ‘Let them burn,’ said The Hutin.

  ‘Really, Louis, do you wish ...’

  ‘Take all your clothes off.’

  Decided now to submit to everything, she took her clothes off with the feeling that she was giving herself to the devil. Louis led her towards the bed; her body was beautiful with sculptured shadows, and it was once more in his power. In order to thank Clémence, he murmured, ‘I promise you, dearest, I promise you to free Raoul de Presles, and all my father’s ministers. Basically you always want the same things as my brother Philippe does!’

  Clémence thought that her surrender would at least be compensated for by some good and that, in default of penance, innocent people would be set free.

  A great cry arose that night from the royal bedchamber. Having been married five months, Queen Clémence discovered only now that one was not Queen only to be unhappy, and that the portals of marriage might open upon unknown joys.
/>   For long minutes she rested exhausted, breathless, amazed, almost beside herself, as if the sea of her native shores had washed her up on some golden strand. It was she who sought the King’s shoulder in order to rest her head upon it in sleep, while Louis, overwhelmed with gratitude for the pleasure he had given her, and feeling more like a king even than on the day of his coronation, knew his first wakeful night free of the fear of death.

  But this night of felicity was, alas, but a solitary one. From the following day, and without having recourse to a confessor, Clémence came to the conclusion that her pleasure partook of sin. She was doubtless more neurotic by nature than she appeared for, from that time, her husband’s approach caused her intolerable suffering, which made her incapable of accepting the royal homage, not through any lack of willingness, but from physical intolerance. It sincerely saddened her. She apologized, made every effort, but in vain, to gratify Louis’s insistent ardours.

  ‘I assure you, my dear Lord, I assure you,’ she said to him, ‘that we must go on a pilgrimage; till then I cannot.’

  ‘Very well, dearest, we shall go, and soon, and as far as you please, with ropes round our necks if you like; but let me first settle the affairs of Artois.’

  6

  Arbitration

  TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, in the largest room in the Manor of Vincennes, transformed for the occasion into a hall of justice, the principal lords of the Kingdom and a great number of lawyers were awaiting the King.

  A delegation of barons from Artois, at their head Gérard Kierez and Jean de Fiennes, as well as the inseparable Souastre and Caumont, had arrived that morning. It seemed as if a solution had been found. The King’s emissaries had worked well, finding points of agreement between the two sides; the Count of Poitiers had inspired much wise compromise and had counselled his mother-in-law to yield on a number of points in order to restore peace in her territories and, when all was said and done, to remain mistress of them.