The Chamberlain, who was coming to tell the Queen that the dying man was asking for her, entered at this moment, but Valois stopped him with a gesture and went on, ‘I don’t wish to push myself forward, but I am the only person who can usefully act as Regent; I shall know how to associate you with it, since I wish to inspire the French with the love they ought to have for the mother of their next King.’
‘Uncle,’ cried Clémence sharply, ‘Louis is still breathing. It would be better if you were to pray for a miracle to save him and, if that is impossible, at least defer your proposals until after his death. And rather than detain me here, let me take my rightful place at his bedside.’
‘Of course, Niece, of course, but there are things to which one must give one’s attention when one is Queen. We may not give way to the sorrows of common people. By his last wishes Louis must decide upon the Regent by name.’
‘Eudeline, don’t leave me,’ murmured the Queen.
And to Bouville she said, as she was going towards the King’s room, ‘Friend Hugues, friend Hugues, I can’t believe it, tell me that it isn’t true!’
This was too much for kind Bouville, who began to weep.
‘When I think, when I only think,’ he said, ‘that it was I who went to fetch you from Naples!’
Eudeline, since the King had been taken ill, had shown a stranger attitude. She never left the Queen, who relied upon her for everything she needed, to the point where her ladies-in-waiting were beginning to show resentment. Face to face with the dying agonies of this man, of this sovereign whose first mistress she had been, whom she had loved submissively, and then implacably hated, Eudeline felt no emotion at all. She was thinking neither of him nor of herself. It was as if her memories had died before their creator. All her emotions were centred upon the Queen, her friend. And if Eudeline was suffering at this time, it was from the suffering of Clémence.
The Queen crossed the room, leaning on the arms of Eudeline on one side and of Bouville on the other.
Seeing the latter, Tolomei, still standing in the doorway, suddenly remembered what he had come to do.
‘It certainly is no time to talk to Bouville,’ he thought. ‘And doubtless the two Cressay brothers are in my house at this moment. In truth the King’s death could not have occurred at a more awkward moment.’
Just then he felt himself jostled by a powerful body; the Countess Mahaut, her sleeves rolled up, was forcing her way through the crowd. In spite of her disgrace, no one was surprised to see her; it became so near a relation, who was also a peer of the Kingdom, to be present in the circumstances.
She had carefully composed her expression to give an appearance of the utmost stupefaction and dismay.
As she entered the room she muttered, but sufficiently distinctly for at least ten people to hear her, ‘God, so soon! It’s really too much! Poor France!’
Advancing with a sort of soldierly step she made her way towards the family. Charles de la Marche, his arms crossed, his handsome face somewhat drawn, was flanked by his cousins, Philippe of Valois, and Robert of Artois.
Mahaut extended both her hands to Robert with an expression that seemed to say that she was too moved to speak and that upon such a day all dissension was forgotten. Then she went and knelt by the royal bed and said in a broken voice, ‘Sire, I beseech you to forgive me for all the trouble I have caused you.’
Louis looked at her; his large pale eyes were surrounded with the dark shadows of death. They were just in process of changing his bedpan in sight of all; in this uncomfortable situation, trying to keep mastery over himself, he assumed for the first time something of true majesty, something royal indeed, which he had lacked all his life.
‘I forgive you, Cousin, if you submit to the King’s will,’ he replied, when they had slipped a new bedpan under him.
‘Sire, I swear it!’ replied Mahaut.
And more than one person present was sincerely moved to see the terrible countess bend the knee and make submission.
Robert of Artois’s eyes narrowed, and he whispered to Philippe of Valois, ‘She couldn’t be playing her part better if she’d killed him herself.’
It was the first twinge of suspicion.
The Hutin felt a new crisis of pain and placed his hands on his stomach. His lips parted to reveal clenched teeth; the sweat poured from his temples and matted his hair. After a few seconds he seemed to recover and said, ‘Is that what suffering is? Is that what it is? May God forgive me for having made others suffer.’
His head moved a little on the pillows and his eyes rested for a long time upon Clémence.
‘My dearest, my darling, what agony it is to leave you! I want you to keep this house, since we loved each other here. Etienne! Etienne!’ he said, waving his fingers towards Chancellor de Mornay who was sitting at his bedside, paper in hand, in order to take down the King’s last wishes. ‘Write that I leave to Queen Clémence this Manor of the Forest of Vincennes and that I wish her to be given twenty-five thousand pounds a year.’
‘Louis, my dear lord,’ said Clémence, ‘don’t think of me, you have already given me too much. But, I beseech you, think of those whom you have wronged; you promised me ...’
‘Say on, say on, my darling, and what you desire shall be done.’
‘Her daughter,’ she murmured.
The dying man’s eyebrows puckered, as if he were trying to read the already distant horizon of memory.
‘So you knew, Clémence?’ he said. ‘Very well let Eudeline’s daughter be an Abbess and of a royal abbey; I will it.’
Eudeline bowed her head.
‘May God bless you, Monseigneur Louis,’ she said.
‘And who else?’ he went on. ‘Whom have I wronged? Ah, yes, my godson, Louis de Marigny. I wish him to know I am filled with remorse for having persecuted his father.’
And he had it noted down that he left him ten thousand pounds a year.
‘It’s not everyone who has had the luck to have a father hanged,’ said Robert of Artois to his neighbour. ‘To have had him killed in battle, as mine was, appears to be less valuable.’
Charles of Valois, who had joined their group, replied, ‘It’s easy enough to leave money, but how am I going to find enough to pay it all?’
And he signed to Etienne de Mornay that the list was now long enough, and that he must hurry up and get the codicil signed. The Chancellor took the point at once and obeyed. Louis scratched at the sheet with the pen they handed him. Then he gazed round upon those present, as if obsessed by some anxiety, looking for someone who should have been there.
‘Who do you want, Louis?’ asked Clémence.
‘My father,’ he murmured.
And those about him thought that his delirium was beginning. But in fact he was trying to remember how his father had acted on his deathbed eighteen months earlier. He turned to his confessor, a Dominican from Poissy, and said, ‘The miracle. My father transmitted the royal miracle to me, to whom can I transmit it?’
Charles of Valois came forward, ready as always to receive any crumb of power which might fall from the throne. How he would have enjoyed curing scrofula by the laying on of hands!
But the Dominican had bent down to Louis X’s ear and was reassuring him. Kings might die in silence; the Church remembered. If Louis had a son, the rite of the miracle would be revealed to him in due course.
Then Louis’s eyes turned to Clémence’s face, sought her throat, then her waist, and rested there for a long time as if, concentrating the last forces of his will, the dying man was seeking to transmit all that he had received from three centuries of royal ascendancy.
This took place upon June 4th, 1316.
10
Tolomei Prays for the King
WHEN TOLOMEI GOT home in the middle of the afternoon, his chief clerk immediately came to announce that there were two men from the country waiting for him in the ante-chamber to his study.
‘They look very angry indeed,’ he added. ‘They’ve been the
re since nones, have had nothing to eat, and say they won’t go away till they’ve seen you.’
‘Yes, I know who they are,’ Tolomei replied. ‘Close the doors and gather the whole household in my study, clerks, footmen, grooms, and housemaids. And hurry up! Send everyone up there.’
Then he went slowly upstairs himself, assuming the gait of an old man overwhelmed with sorrow; he stopped a moment on the landing, listening to the commotion that his orders had caused in the house; he waited till he could see the first of them coming upstairs, and then went into the ante-chamber, his hand pressed to his forehead.
The brothers Cressay rose to their feet, and Jean, coming towards him, cried, ‘Messire Tolomei, we are ...’
Tolomei stopped him with a wave of his hand.
‘Yes, I know!’ he said in a broken voice. ‘I know who you are, and I know too what you have come to say to me. But all that is nothing in face of our affliction.’
As the other wished to pursue the matter, he turned towards the door and said to his people who were beginning to arrive, ‘Come in, my friends, come in, all of you; come and hear the appalling news from your master’s mouth! Come in, come in, my friends.’
The room was soon filled. If the brothers Cressay had wished to take any action whatever, they would have immediately been disarmed.
‘Really, Messire, what’s all this about?’ Pierre asked impatiently.
‘One moment, one moment,’ replied Tolomei. ‘Everyone must hear the news.’
Somewhat anxious, the Cressay brothers thought that the banker was about to announce their family dishonour in public. It was more than they had bargained for.
‘Is everyone here?’ Tolomei asked. ‘Very well, my friends, listen to what I have to say.’
He could not go on. There was a long silence. Tolomei had hidden his face in his hands, and everyone thought that he was weeping. When he uncovered his face, the single eye that was open was indeed filled with tears.
‘My dear, faithful friends,’ he said at last, ‘the most appalling thing has happened! Our King, our greatly loved King, has just expired.’
His voice seemed to be strangled in his throat; he beat his breast as if he himself had been responsible for the sovereign’s death. He took advantage of the surprise the announcement made to say, ‘Now, let us kneel, all of us, and pray for his soul.’
He himself sank heavily to the ground, and all his staff followed his example.
‘Really, Messeigneurs, on your knees!’ he said reproachfully to the two Cressay brothers who, astounded by the news and completely bewildered by the spectacle confronting them, had alone remained standing.
‘In nomine patris ...’ Tolomei began.
There was a concert of strident lamentation. The servants of the household, who were all Italians, became a weeping choir in accordance with the best traditions of their country.
‘Requiescat ...’ the men all murmured together.
‘Oh, how kind he was! How good he was! How pious he was!’ wept the cook.
And all the housemaids and laundrymaids wept aloud, putting their aprons over their heads and hiding their faces.
Tolomei had risen to his feet and was moving among his staff.
‘That’s right, pray, pray well! Yes, he was good indeed, yes, he was a saint! Sinners, that’s what we are, incurable sinners! Pray, young men,’ he said, putting his hands on the heads of the Cressay brothers. ‘Indeed, death will take you too! Repent, repent!’
This piece of play-acting lasted a good twenty minutes. Then Tolomei said, ‘Close the doors, close down the counters. This is a day of mourning; we shall do no business this evening.’
The servants went out, snivelling. As the head clerk passed him, Tolomei whispered, ‘Don’t make any payments. Gold may have changed its value by tomorrow.’
The women were still howling as they went downstairs, and their sobs continued throughout the evening and during the whole night. They were competing with each other in vocal grief.
‘He was the benefactor of his people!’ they sobbed. ‘Never, never shall we have so good a king again!’
Tolomei let the hangings which covered the entrance of his study fall back into place.
‘Thus,’ he said, ‘thus pass the glories of the world.’
The two Cressays were completely checkmated. Their personal drama was submerged beneath the general misfortune which had fallen upon the Kingdom.
Besides, they were probably somewhat tired. They had spent a day hare-hunting, followed by a night on horseback, and how ill-mounted!
Their arrival in Paris at dawn, both mounted upon the same broken-winded nag, and dressed in their father’s old clothes which they used for hunting, had made the passers-by laugh. A crowd of screaming urchins had escorted them. They had naturally lost themselves in the labyrinthine alleys of the Cité. They were appallingly hungry, which is difficult to bear at twenty. Their assurance, if not their resentment, had greatly weakened when they saw the sumptuousness of Tolomei’s house. They were impressed by the wealth they saw on every hand, the large staff of servants better dressed than they were themselves, the tapestries, the carved furniture, the enamels, and the ivories of which merely one of the more inferior pieces would have sufficed to rebuild Cressay. ‘When it comes to the point,’ they each said to themselves without daring to admit it to the other, ‘we may very well have been wrong to show ourselves so touchy about the question of blue blood; a fortune such as this is well worth the rank of a noble.’
‘Well, my good friends!’ said Tolomei, with the familiarity that their having prayed in common seemed to authorize, ‘let us discuss this painful affair because, after all, one has to go on living and the world does not cease to turn because of those who have gone. You wish, naturally, to speak to me of my nephew. The rascal! The rogue! To do such a thing to me who have always overwhelmed him with kindness! What a miserable, shameless boy! That I should be exposed to this additional sorrow upon this day of all days. I know everything, everything; he sent me a message this morning. You see before you a much tried man.’
He stood before them, somewhat bent, his eyes upon the ground, in an attitude of utter dejection.
‘And a coward too,’ he went on. ‘A coward! I’m ashamed to have to admit it, Messeigneurs. He did not dare confront my anger. He left straightaway for Sienna. By now he must be far away. Well, my friends, what are we to do?’
He gave the impression of placing himself in their hands, almost of asking their advice. The two brothers looked at each other. Nothing was turning out quite as they had expected.
Tolomei looked at them from beneath his almost closed right eyelid. ‘Good,’ he said to himself, ‘now that I’ve got them in hand, they’re no longer dangerous; I’ve now merely got to find some way of sending them home without giving them anything.’
He rose decisively to his feet.
‘But I disinherit him! Do you hear, I disinherit him! You won’t get anything from me, you little wretch!’ he cried, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of Sienna. ‘Nothing! Ever! I shall leave everything to the poor and to convents! And should he ever again fall into my hands, I shall deliver him to the justice of the King. Alas! Alas!’ he began groaning again. ‘The King is dead!’
It was almost up to the other two to give him consolation.
Tolomei now judged them sufficiently prepared to make them see reason. He accepted and approved every reproach, every complaint that they had to make; indeed, he forestalled them all. But what was to be done now? What useful purpose would a lawsuit serve, expensive as it was for people who were not rich, when the criminal was out of reach and would have crossed the frontier before six days were out? Would it save their sister? The scandal would do nothing but harm to the Cressays themselves. Tolomei would once more devote himself to finding a solution. He would take every possible step to repair the harm that had been done; he had powerful and exalted contacts; he was a friend of Monseigneur of Valois who, it seemed likely, would beco
me Regent, of Monseigneur of Artois, and of Messire de Bouville. Some place would be found in which Marie could bear her child of sin in the greatest possible secrecy, and her life would be arranged. For a time, perhaps, a nunnery might shelter her repentance. Let them have confidence in Tolomei! Had he not proved to the Cressays themselves that he was a kindly man by carrying forward the debt of three hundred pounds that they owed him?
‘Had I so wished, your castle would have been mine two years ago. But did I wish it? No. You see what I mean.’
The two brothers, already much shaken, perfectly understood the threat which underlay the banker’s paternal manner.
‘Understand me, I’m demanding nothing,’ he added.
But if it came to a lawsuit, he would naturally be obliged to state the facts, and the judges might well be prejudiced against them when they heard of all the presents they had received from Guccio.
Well then, they were a couple of sensible young men; they would go off now to a good inn, and he’d pay the bill, where they could have a good dinner and spend the night, and wait until Tolomei had had time to arrange matters for them. He thought that he would be able to give them some good news the following day.
Pierre and Jean de Cressay bowed to his reasoning and indeed, upon taking leave, shook his hand somewhat effusively.
After their departure Tolomei threw himself into a chair. He felt rather tired.
‘And now, let’s hope to God the King dies!’ he said to himself. For when he had left Vincennes, Louis X was still breathing, though no one thought that he had many hours to live.
The Poisoned Crown Page 21
