The Poisoned Crown

by Maurice Druon

  Louis looked with regret at the leather ball, wiped his face, and put his robe on over his shirt, saying, ‘Go on playing without me, Messeigneurs!’

  Then he went into the Palace, saying to his Chamberlain, ‘As soon as they know, Mathieu, come and tell me.’

  5

  The Cardinal’s Spell

  THE MAN STANDING AT the end of the room had a twitching face, dark narrow eyes close to his nose, and a shaved skull like a monk. He was tall, but was unable to stand at his full height owing to a shortening of his right leg.

  Unlike an ordinary prisoner, who would have been guarded by two sergeants-at-arms, he was escorted by two esquires of the Count of Poitiers, Adam Heron and Pierre de Garancière.

  Louis X barely acknowledged his presence. He nodded to his uncle of Valois, his brothers of Poitiers and la Marche, his cousin of Clermont, and Miles des Noyers, brother-in-law of the Constable and a Councillor of Parliament, who had risen at his entry.

  ‘What is going forward?’ he asked, taking his place among them and signing to them to be seated.

  ‘A grave matter of sorcery, or so we are assured,’ replied Charles of Valois in a somewhat ironic tone.

  ‘Could not the Keeper of the Seals be instructed to examine the matter himself without bothering me today of all days?’

  ‘That was just what I was telling your brother Philippe,’ said Valois.

  The Count of Poitiers calmly rested his chin on his joined hands.

  ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘this is a serious matter, not only because of the sorcery, which is common enough, but because this particular manifestation of it is taking place within the Conclave itself, and thereby shows what the attitude of certain of the Cardinals is towards us.’

  A year earlier, at the mere word ‘Conclave’, The Hutin would have been most concerned. But since Marguerite’s death it had become a question in which he felt no interest at all.

  ‘This man is called Everard,’ went on the Count of Poitiers.

  ‘Everard,’ the King repeated automatically to show that he was listening.

  ‘He is a clerk at Bar-sur-Aube; but he was once a member of the Order of the Templars, in which he held the rank of Knight.’

  ‘A Templar, I see!’ said the King.

  ‘A fortnight ago he gave himself up to our people in Lyons, who have sent him to us.’

  ‘Who sent him to you, Philippe,’ corrected Charles of Valois.

  The Count of Poitiers appeared to pay no attention to this remark. It was a question of a conflict of power, and Valois was annoyed that the matter had been dealt with over his head.

  ‘Everard has said that he has revelations to make,’ went on Philippe of Poitiers, ‘and he was promised that he would come to no harm on condition that he told the truth, a promise which we will certify now. From his avowals ...’

  The King’s eyes were fixed on the door, awaiting the appearance of his Chamberlain; the hope of becoming a father was, at the moment, his sole preoccupation. His great fault as a Sovereign lay perhaps in the fact that he always had his mind upon something other than the question under discussion. He was incapable of concentration, which is the gravest of all faults in the powerful.

  He was surprised by the silence which had fallen upon them and ceased smiling.

  ‘Well, Brother ...’ he said.

  ‘Brother, I have no desire to interrupt your thoughts. I shall wait till you have terminated your reflections.’

  The Hutin blushed a little.

  ‘No, no, I’m listening, go on,’ he said.

  ‘According to the statements of this man,’ Poitiers went on, ‘Everard went to Valence to seek the protection of a Cardinal upon a matter in which he had had a difference with his Bishop ... This needs going into further,’ he added, addressing himself to Miles des Noyers, who was in charge of the interrogation.

  Everard heard but gave no sign of grasping the implication.

  Poitiers went on, ‘It was only by chance, he says, that he made the acquaintance of Cardinal Francesco Caetani.’

  ‘The nephew of Pope Boniface,’ said Louis, to show that he was following.

  ‘That is so. And he has become an intimate friend of the Cardinal, who is an alchemist of note, since he has in his house, so Everard tells us, a room full of cauldrons, retorts, and diverse chemicals.’

  ‘All the Cardinals are more or less alchemists; it’s their peculiar hobby,’ said Charles of Valois, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Monseigneur Duèze has himself, it appears, written treatises upon it.’

  ‘He has, indeed, Uncle; I have read part of his Authoritative Treatise upon the Art of Transmutation without, I must admit, understanding much of it. But the present business goes much further than alchemy, which is an extremely useful and respectable science. Cardinal Caetani wanted to find someone who could evoke the devil in order to cast spells.’

  Charles de la Marche, emulating the ironic attitude of his uncle Valois, said, ‘There’s a Cardinal who smacks of the bonfire.’

  ‘All right, burn him,’ said The Hutin indifferently, looking at the door again.

  ‘Who do you want to burn, Brother? The Cardinal?’

  ‘Oh, it’s the Cardinal, is it? No, you can’t do that.’

  Philippe of Poitiers sighed in exasperation before going on, emphasizing his words.

  ‘Everard told the Cardinal that he knew a man who made gold to the profit of the Count of Bar.’

  Hearing that name, Valois rose to his feet in indignation and cried, ‘Really, Nephew, we’re wasting our time! I know the Count of Bar well enough to be quite sure that he would never indulge in that sort of foolishness! We are merely confronted with a false accusation of black magic, such as are made twenty times a day, and it is really not worth our while listening to it.’

  Though trying to remain calm, Philippe finally lost patience.

  ‘You listened to denunciations of sorcery all right when they were attributed to Marigny,’ he replied dryly; ‘you might at least listen to this one. In the first place, it is not a question of your friend the Count of Bar, as you will see. Everard did not go and find the man he had mentioned, but brought to the Cardinal’s notice a certain Jéhan du Pré, another ex-Templar, who happened by chance to be at Valence. That’s right, isn’t it, Everard?’

  Bowing his dark head, the witness silently agreed.

  ‘Don’t you agree, Uncle,’ went on Poitiers, ‘too great a concatenation of risks to be fortuitous, and too many Templars in the neighbourhood of the Conclave and in close proximity to Boniface’s nephew?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ murmured Valois, somewhat subdued.

  Turning to Everard, Poitiers suddenly asked him, ‘Do you know Messire Jean de Longwy?’

  Everard’s face gave its customary twitch, and his spatulate fingers gripped the cord of his habit. Nevertheless, he replied without hesitation, ‘No, Monseigneur, he’s only a name to me. I know that he is a nephew of our late Grand Master.’

  ‘Are you sure that you have never had any contact with him?’ Poitiers insisted. ‘Or received, through ex-members of your Order, any communications from him?’

  ‘I have heard that Messire de Longwy has tried to keep contact with some of us; but nothing else.’

  ‘And you have not learnt, through Jéhan du Pré for instance, the name of some ex-Templar who came to the army in Flanders to deliver messages to Longwy and take others from him?’

  Both the Charleses, Valois and de la Marche, looked equally surprised. Without doubt, Philippe knew a great deal more than other people about a number of things; but why did he always keep his information to himself?

  Everard had maintained a bold front to the Count of Poitiers’s scrutiny. But the latter said to himself, ‘I’m almost certain that it is he, the description I’ve been given fits him too nearly. And he’s lame.’

  ‘Were you ever tortured?’ he asked.

  ‘My leg, Monseigneur, bears witness for me!’ cried Everard, beginning to tremble.
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  The Hutin was becoming anxious. ‘The physicians are taking too long. Clémence is not pregnant and no one dares to come and tell me.’ His attention was re-engaged by Everard, who had fallen to his knees before him and was screaming, ‘Sire! Sire, have mercy, don’t have me tortured again! I swear to God that what I am saying is the truth!’

  ‘You mustn’t swear, it’s a sin,’ said the King.

  The two esquires forced Everard to his feet.

  ‘Noyers, you must clear up that point about the army,’ said Poitiers, addressing the Councillor of Parliament. ‘Continue with the interrogation.’

  Miles des Noyers, a man of some thirty years, with thick hair and two deep furrows across his forehead, said, ‘Well, Everard, what did the Cardinal say to you?’

  The ex-Templar, barely recovered from his panic, replied in a rapid voice, and it was unlikely that he was lying, ‘The Cardinal said to us, to Jehan du Pré and myself, that he wished to avenge the memory of his uncle, and become Pope; and that to do so he must destroy the enemies who stood in his way; and he promised us three hundred pounds if we would help him. And the two principal enemies whom he indicated were ...’

  Everard looked at the King in some hesitation.

  ‘All right, go on,’ said Miles des Noyers.

  ‘He indicated the King of France and the Count of Poitiers, and said that he would be delighted to see them turning up their toes.’

  The Hutin automatically looked at his shoes; then he started in his chair and cried, ‘Turn up my toes? The wicked Cardinal wants my death!’

  ‘Precisely so, Brother,’ said Poitiers smiling; ‘and mine too.’

  ‘And you, cripple, don’t you realize that for a crime such as that you would be burnt in this world and damned in the next?’ The Hutin continued.

  ‘Sire, Cardinal Caetani assured us that, when he became Pope, he would see that we had absolution.’

  Leaning forward, his hands upon his knees, Louis looked at the ex-Templar in amazement.

  ‘Do people dislike me so much that they want to kill me?’ he said. ‘And how did the Cardinal propose to do it?’

  ‘He said that you were too well guarded, Sire, for either steel or poison to be effective, and that it must be brought about by casting a spell. To this end he had a pound of pure wax delivered to us, which we put to melt in a basin of hot water in the room where the cauldrons were. Then Jéhan du Pré moulded an admirable likeness with a crown on its head ...’

  Louis X quickly crossed himself.

  ‘And then another smaller one, with a smaller crown. While we were working the Cardinal came to see us; he appeared to be in extremely good spirits, and he even began laughing when he saw the first image and he said to us, “He has an enormous privy member.”’19

  Charles of Valois could not retain a burst of laughter.

  ‘All right, we’ll leave that,’ said The Hutin nervously. ‘What did you do with the images?’

  ‘We put papers inside them.’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘The papers which have to be placed in the image with the name of the person it represents and the words of the spell. But I promise you, Sire,’ cried Everard, ‘that we wrote neither your name nor that of Messire of Poitiers! At the last moment we took fright, and we wrote the names of Giacomo and Pietro Colonna ...’

  ‘The two Colonna cardinals?’ asked Poitiers.

  ‘... because the Cardinal had also mentioned them as enemies of his. I swear, I swear it was so!’

  Louis X was now listening to every word that was said and seemed to be looking for support from his younger brother.

  ‘Do you believe, Philippe, that the man is telling the truth?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Philippe.

  ‘He must be properly interrogated by the tormentors,’ said Louis.

  The word ‘tormentors’ seemed to have a fatal effect on Everard, for he once more fell to his knees and dragged himself towards the King, his hands joined in supplication, repeating over and over again that he had been promised that he would not be tortured if he made a complete avowal! There was a little white froth at the corner of his lips, and fear had made him wild-eyed.

  ‘Stop him! Don’t let him touch me!’ cried Louis X. ‘The man’s possessed.’

  It would have been difficult to tell which of the two, the King or the caster of spells, was the more frightened.

  ‘Torture serves no purpose,’ cried Everard; ‘it’s because of torture that I denied God.’

  Miles des Noyers made a note of this unsolicited admission.

  ‘But now it’s remorse that drives me,’ continued Everard, still upon his knees. ‘I’ll tell you everything. We had no holy oil with which to baptize the images. We had the Cardinal, who was sitting in Consistory in the big church, secretly told this, and he replied that we should approach a certain priest in a certain church behind the slaughter-yard, pretending that the holy oil was required for a sick man.’

  There was no need to ask Everard questions. Of his own accord he was giving them the names of the people in the Cardinal’s service. He cited the chaplain-secretary Andrieu, Father Pierre, and Brother Bost.

  ‘Then we took the two images and the two sacred candles, and a pot of holy water, hiding them under our habits, and we went to the Cardinal’s goldsmith, a man named Boudon, who had an extremely beautiful young wife, and who was to act as godfather while his wife acted as godmother. We baptized the images in a barber’s bowl. After which we took them back to the Cardinal, who was extremely grateful to us, and himself placed the pins in the heart and the vital parts.’

  There was a moment’s silence; the door half-opened and Mathieu de Trye’s head appeared. But the King signed to him with his hand to retire.

  ‘And what happened then?’ asked Miles des Noyers.

  ‘The Cardinal then asked us to proceed to further spells,’ replied Everard. ‘But I began to be anxious because too many people knew about it, and I left for Lyons, where I gave myself up to the King’s people, who sent me here.’

  ‘Did you get the three hundred pounds?’

  ‘Yes, Messire.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Charles de la Marche. ‘What on earth could a clerk want three hundred pounds for?’

  Everard bowed his head.

  ‘Women, Monseigneur,’ he answered in a low voice.

  ‘Or for the Temple perhaps ...’ the Count of Poitiers said as if to himself.

  The King, overwhelmed by private anxieties, said nothing.

  ‘To the Petit Châtelet!’ said Poitiers to his two esquires, indicating Everard.

  The latter allowed himself to be taken away without any resistance whatever. He seemed suddenly to have come to the end of his strength.

  ‘These ex-Templars appear to be quite a gang of sorcerers,’ Poitiers went on.

  ‘We ought not to have burnt the Grand Master,’ murmured Louis X.

  ‘I said as much as the time,’ cried Valois.

  ‘Of course, Uncle, you did say so,’ replied Poitiers. ‘But that is not the question now. It’s perfectly clear that the refugees from the Temple have formed a secret society, and that they will go to all lengths to serve our enemies. Everard has not said half of what he knows. His story has been rehearsed beforehand, that’s quite clear, and he only began to tell the whole truth towards the end. But it is also quite clear that this Conclave, which has been moving from town to town for almost exactly two years, is now bringing Christianity into contempt as much as it is beginning to injure the Kingdom; and that the Cardinals, in their eagerness to obtain the tiara, are behaving in a manner deserving of excommunication.’

  ‘Is it not possible that Cardinal Duèze,’ said Miles des Noyers, ‘has sent us this man in order to damage Caetani?’

  ‘Perfectly possible,’ said Poitiers. ‘Everard appears to be one of those demented people who will support any cause provided it is a rotten one.’

  He was interrupted by Monseigneur of Valois, whose expression ha
d suddenly become both reflective and extremely grave.

  ‘Don’t you think, Philippe,’ he said, ‘that you should go yourself to visit the locality of the Conclave, whose affairs you seem to know so well, introduce some sort of order into it, and give us a Pope? You seem to me perfectly cut out for the part.’

  Philippe gave the ghost of a smile. ‘Uncle Charles thinks he’s being very clever!’ he thought. ‘He’s at last found an opportunity of removing me from Paris, and sending me into a wasp’s nest.’

  ‘Oh, how wise your advice is, Uncle!’ cried Louis X. ‘Of course, Philippe must do us this service, and he’s the only man who can. Brother, I shall be very grateful to you if you will undertake this business. Make an inquiry on your own account into the matter of the papers which have been placed in the images, and find out whether these have really been baptized in our names. Yes, indeed, this must be done at once, and it’s as much to your interest as mine. Do you know what religious procedure should be invoked to protect oneself against a spell? After all, God is stronger than the devil.’

  He did not give the impression of being completely certain of it.

  The Count of Poitiers considered the matter. At heart he was tempted by the proposal. To leave the Court for a few weeks, where he had no power to prevent the follies that were committed, and where he was in perpetual conflict with the faction in power, and go to fulfil what was clearly a useful mission, attracted him. He would take with him his faithful adherents, Gaucher de Châtillon, Miles des Noyers, Raoul de Presles, and who could tell what might not happen? He who has made a Pope is well placed to receive a crown. The throne of the German Empire, which his father had already considered for him, and for which he had, in his capacity of Count Palatine, the right to stand, might one day become vacant.

  ‘Very well, Brother, I accept, in order to do you service,’ he replied.

  ‘What a good brother I have!’ cried Louis X.

  He rose to embrace Philippe, and stopped in the middle of the gesture with a loud cry.

  ‘My leg! My leg! It’s gone cold; it’s trembling; I can no longer feel the ground under my foot!’ It was as if the devil had already caught him by the calf of the leg.