“At age sixty-six, he walked eight hundred kilometers? That’s five hundred miles.”
“He was a strong man. But his enemies were more strong, sad to say. The man who led the case against him here was le Cardinal Blanc—the White Cardinal.”
“But…” I felt silly asking. “Weren’t all the cardinals white in those days?”
She furrowed her brow, then laughed. “Ah, non, not the skin. The robe. He always wore the white robe of the Cistercian monks. Even after he became a cardinal. Even after he became the pope.”
“Wait. The White Cardinal became the pope? Which pope was he?”
“Benedict Twelve,” she said. “Before he was pope, his name was Fournier. Jacques Fournier. He was brought here by Pope John Twenty-Two to be the police théologique.”
“You mean to punish heretics? Like the Inquisition?”
“Exactement. He adored to be the Inquisitor. He protected the back of the pope. And when John Twenty-Two died, voilà, le Cardinal Blanc became the new pope, Benedict Twelve. He was the one who built the Palais des Papes. Before, the pope was in the bishop’s house. Then he tears that down and builds the fortress.”
“But while he was a cardinal, he was Eckhart’s enemy?” She nodded gravely. “The cardinal who was the pope’s guard dog?” Another nod. “That is a powerful enemy.”
A third and final nod. “You see? Eckhart comes to Avignon in 1327 to make his defense. And he is never seen again.”
* * *
“I don’t know if this Eckhart is our guy,” I whispered, “but he’s sure an intriguing guy.”
Miranda nodded without glancing up from the screen of her laptop. We were sitting in Avignon’s library — a spectacular library, housed in a former cardinal’s palace — beneath a gilded, coffered ceiling in the main reading room, which had once been the grand audience hall. When I’d mentioned Elisabeth’s theory about Meister Eckhart, Miranda had taken the idea and run with it, straight to the library’s reference desk.
Now I was skimming an English-language book on Eckhart’s life and teachings, which a helpful young librarian, Philippe, had found on the shelves. Meanwhile Miranda was combing Web sites and archival materials about Avignon’s cemeteries and death records, looking for any references to Eckhart’s death or grave. “The date of his death is unknown,” she murmured. “So is his burial site. Like Elisabeth said, he came here — in 1327 or 1328—to defend himself against charges of heresy. Then, poof, he drops off the radar screen. No mention of him until March 1329, when John Twenty-Two issued a papal bull, a pronouncement, condemning a bunch of Eckhart’s teachings. According to the bull, Eckhart took them all back — get this—before he died.”
“Sure sounds like bull,” I said.
“Indeed. But the point is, we know he was dead by March 1329.”
I went back to my book. The more I read, the more I liked this Eckhart. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, but he seemed smart, genuine, and passionate about what he believed. He criticized those who asked God for personal favors, or who prayed “thy will be done” but then complained if things didn’t work out the way they wanted. And he had a sense of humor — not a quality I generally associated with monks and theologians. “My Lord told me a joke,” Eckhart wrote, “and seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read.” He could even be a bit cheeky. “Listen,” I said. “He writes, ‘God is not good, or else he could do better.’ No wonder the theology police put him under surveillance — he’s giving the Big Guy a bad grade.”
Miranda looked thoughtful. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he’s playing with language—good, better, best? God’s not merely good, because good’s only so-so? Maybe he means God can’t be anything but best?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. This is why I study bones, not philosophy.” The most striking thing about Eckhart, though, was how fresh, how modern, some of his insights sounded. “Get this,” I told Miranda. “He wrote, ‘If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “thank you,” it will be enough.’ I like that. Then there’s, ‘The more we have, the less we own.’ Or how about this: ‘The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake’?”
She flinched. “Ouch. Too bad they didn’t stress that one in lifeguard training — I might’ve gotten off my ass sooner and saved that dude from drowning.”
I kicked myself for having jabbed her sore spot. “Sorry. I take it back. Here, remember this one instead: ‘Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.’ Good advice, right? Be your best self? Sounds like something Dr. Phil might say.”
She snorted. “What do you know about Dr. Phil? Have you ever read or heard anything he’s said?”
She had me there. “Okay, okay. It sounds like something I imagine a New Age self-help guru might say.” I flipped a page. “So does this, in a brainier way: ‘There exists only the present instant…a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.’ Isn’t that a Zen-like, New Agey thing for a Catholic friar to be saying seven centuries ago?”
She smiled. “Very Zen. Very Tolle.”
“Very what?”
“Not what, who: Tolle. Eckhart Tolle, in fact — he’s another big self-help guru. His books have sold zillions of copies. And…Hmm, hang on….” Her keyboard clattered with rapid strokes. “In-ter-esting. According to this bio, Eckhart Tolle, darling of the yoga set, was originally named Ulrich Tolle. He changed his first name to Eckhart ‘as a tribute to a wise medieval philosopher and theologian.’ This wise medieval philosopher and theologian, I’m thinking. Tolle’s huge, very New Age.” She scrolled down the screen of her laptop. “His blockbuster book’s called The Power of Now, and it’s all about living in the present moment. How did your medieval monk describe it — as the eternal Now? Here’s the modern guru’s spin on that: ‘Nothing ever happened in the past,’ writes Tolle; “it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.’ Same idea, slightly different words.”
“Hmm,” I said. “So how come the modern guru gets rich and famous, and the medieval monk gets hauled in on a heresy charge and then vanishes, maybe gets murdered?”
She shrugged. “Timing is everything. I guess the masses weren’t ready for Now until…you know…now.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Touché, but not true,” I told her. “Meister Eckhart was an incredibly popular preacher. Too popular. He was brought down by jealous rivals.” I shook my head. “Why is so much scheming and backstabbing — and front stabbing, for that matter — done in the name of God?”
“Duh,” she said. “Don’t pretend to be a dumb-ass. You know perfectly well why.” I didn’t know perfectly well why, but I suspected she was about to tell me why. “People and their gods are just like people and their dogs.”
“Huh?” This time I felt myself six conversational and logical steps behind Miranda.
“You know how people and their dogs resemble one another? Crabby little ladies with snappish little Pekinese? Beefy bubbas with waddling bulldogs? Same thing with theology. Someone who’s bighearted, like your man the Meister, sees God as benevolent. A cruel, vindictive jerk, on the other hand, imagines God as harsh and vengeful. See? At the end of either leash — the dog leash or the God leash — there’s really just a mirror.”
The images — God on a leash, God as a narcissistic reflection — were shockingly irreverent. But she had a point, in an editorial-cartoon kind of way. Miranda almost always had a point.
* * *
It was nearly midnight Sunday; I should have been sleeping, but after tossing and turning for two hours, I gave up, got up, and got dressed.
Outside, a fierce wind was roaring across the rooftops. What had Jean called it? The mistral. The mistral was roaring, and the bells in the skeletal iron steeple of the Carmelite church tolled each time the gusts peaked. The moon was full, and the l
ashing branches outside my window cast shadows that twisted and writhed on my bed, beckoning me outside for some reason. Tiptoeing down the stairs, I unlocked the inn’s rattling wooden gate — the wind nearly tore it from my grasp — and set out into the gale.
Avignon was a maze of narrow, crooked streets, but it was a small maze — barely a mile wide, according to the map I’d studied — so even if I got lost, I couldn’t get terribly lost. Besides, Lumani faced the stone ramparts that ringed the city; to find my way home, all I’d need to do was find and follow the wall. If I walked an extra half mile, so what? The ancient city was beautiful, and the exercise would do me good.
Leaving Lumani, I turned left and followed the wall westward, toward the rocky hill where the Palace of the Popes and the cathedral perched. The streets were empty at this hour, and the city itself was largely shuttered and silent. The only noise came from the wind: the surging, surflike mistral churning across roof tiles and seething through the shredded leaves of plane trees.
I’d not gone far — ten minutes’ easy walk, a scant half mile — when the street butted into another stone wall, even higher than the ancient ramparts: Saint Anne’s Prison, a historical marker informed me, though it was no longer in use. Moonlight cascaded down the rock wall like water sheeting down the face of a cliff. The surface was rough, pockmarked with deep, shadowed craters, which I stepped closer to examine. From waist level up to a height of eight or ten feet, rectangular niches had been gouged into the blocks, and these niches — a hundred or more — were filled with objects: photos, figurines, crucifixes, trinkets, talismans. I puzzled over it, and suddenly I realized what I was seeing. Family and friends of the men inside the prison had filled the niches with mementos and relics.
A half block farther, I came upon a stone chapel tucked against the prison wall; a historical marker identified it as the Chapel of the Pénitents Noirs. The Pénitents Noirs — the Black Penitents — belonged to a religious society that revered John the Baptist; this particular group of them had banded together in the fifteen hundreds to minister to the prison’s inmates as their own way of doing penance. The chapel was small and simple, with the exception of an ornate relief panel above the doorway. The panel, carved in stone, measured eight or ten feet wide by at least fifteen feet high. Most of it was filled with angels, clouds, and rays of sunlight, or rays of heavenly glory; at the center, two hovering angels held some sort of serving tray between them in the sky. By the pale light of the moon, as the mistral roared overhead, I saw that the angels were serving up the severed head of the Baptist: a grisly reminder that martyrs — their bodies and bones — occupied a prominent and powerful place in the faith of medieval Catholics. More mementos and relics.
Zigging and zagging through the labyrinthine streets, I made my way toward what I hoped was the Palace of the Popes. Sure enough, above a nearby rooftop loomed a massive tower, fifteen stories high. The battlements at the top overhung the tower’s wall slightly; moonlight streamed down through narrow slits in the overhangs, streaking the stones of the wall. The slits, I realized as I reached the tower’s base and peered up, would allow boiling oil to be poured down onto attackers — or, at the moment, down onto me. So much for turning the other cheek, I mused.
The buttressed foundations seemed to grow like stony roots from the rock. A cobblestone pedestrian alley, carved deep into the rock, wound upward along the base of the palace here. Threading my way through the tight passage and passing beneath the thick arch of a flying buttress, I emerged into the great square fronted by the Palace of the Popes.
I found myself at the southeastern corner of the palace, far from the main entrance, and at the opposite end from the cathedral. The walls gleamed silvery white in the moonlight, with deep shadows delineating the arches and overhangs and arrow slits in the masonry. As I studied the details, a shaft of light at the base of the wall caught my eye. A small wooden door at the corner of the palace opened, and a man in black emerged, closing and locking the door behind him. He started across the square, and his walk — a loping gait with a slight limp — looked familiar. “Stefan?” I was only thirty feet from him, but the rushing wind swept my words away, so I called again, louder. “Stefan!” He whirled, scanning the square, coiling into a crouch as if to run. “Stefan, it’s Bill Brockton,” I yelled, waving both arms. He un-coiled and met me halfway.
“Mon Dieu, Bill, quelle surprise. What are you doing here at the middle of night?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “The wind, I guess — rattling the rooftops and rattling me. So I decided to take a walk, see the city by moonlight. What are you doing here at this time of night?”
He rolled his eyes. “A rah,” he said.
“Excuse me? What’s a ‘rah’?”
“A rodent. A big mouse.”
“Oh, a rat,” I said, remembering that the French tended to swallow the ends of their words.
He looked impatient. “Oui, a rah-t.” The way he emphasized the t this time, it almost sounded as if he’d spat it at me. “I finally got the motion detector working correctly,” he went on. “I have it linked to my computer, and something set it off a few minutes ago. So I came quickly. But it was just a big rat, eating a sandwich I left in the corner of the trésorerie at lunch today. Quelle peste!”
“Better a rat than a thief, though,” I offered. “And at least you know the alarm works.”
“Bien sûr! Of course. But now I’m on the edge, so it’s difficult to sleep.”
“You’re welcome to join me on a walk, if you want.”
He seemed surprised by the offer. “Oui, pourquoi pas? Midnight in the city of the popes. I will be your tour guide.”
Damn, I thought. Be careful what you wish for.
Stefan gestured at the façade of the palace. The tour was beginning. “This part closest to us,” he announced, “is the ‘new palace,’ built by Clement the Sixth between 1342 and 1352.”
“He was the pope who protected the Jews during the plague?”
“Exactement.”
“Busy guy.”
“Oui. So, the big windows at this end of the building? The audience hall, where he held court. Above is his private chapel. Chapel — ha! It’s bigger than the cathedral! You know what Clement said about being pope?” I shook my head, as he’d hoped I would. “Clement said none of his predecessors knew how to be pope.”
“What did he mean?”
“He meant that none of the others knew how to throw such big parties. He was also called ‘Clement the Magnificent.’ When he was crowned as pope, he gave a feast for three thousand people. He served one thousand sheep, nine hundred goats, a hundred cows, a hundred calves, and sixty pigs.”
“Goodness. That’s, what, ten, twenty pounds of meat for every person?”
“Ah, but there is more. Much more. Ten thousand chickens. Fourteen hundred geese. Three hundred fish—”
“Only three hundred?”
He stretched his arms wide—“Pike, very big fish”—then transformed the gesture into a shrug. “But also, Catholics eat a lot of fish, so maybe it was not considered a delicacy.” He held up a finger. “Plus fifty thousand cheeses. And for dessert? Fifty thousand tarts.”
“That’s not possible. Surely somebody exaggerated.”
“Non, non, pas du tout. We have the book of accounts. It records what they bought, and how much it cost.”
“How much did it cost?”
“More than I will earn in my entire life. But it was a smart investment. It made him a favorite with the people who mattered — kings and queens and dukes. And, of course, with his cardinals and bishops, who sent him money they collected in their churches.” Turning away from the palace, he pointed to a building on the opposite side of the square. “Do you know this building?” I shook my head. “It’s just as important as the palace.”
“What is it?”
“The papal mint.”
“Mint, as in money?”
He nodded. “The popes coined their own money
, and they built this mint here. They made gold florins in the mint, then stored them in the treasury in the palace.”
“The popes had their own mint? That seems ironic, since Jesus chased the money changers out of the temple in Jerusalem.”
“If you look for inconsistencies, you will find a million. The popes had armies. They had mistresses. They had children. They poisoned their rivals. They lived like kings and emperors; better than kings and emperors.”
“And nobody objected?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Some of the Franciscans — founded by Saint Francis of Assisi — they were very critical. They said monks and priests and popes should live in poverty, like Jesus. Pope John the Twenty-Second didn’t like that. He condemned the most outspoken ones. He had many Franciscans — monks, even nuns — burned at the stake.”
By now we’d reached the upper end of the square, where the palace sat cheek by jowl with the cathedral. Here the square lay well below the palace and the cathedral, and an immense staircase led up to a broad terrace in front of the church. The terrace held an immense crucifix, surrounded by statues of angels and weeping followers; high above it, atop the bell tower of the cathedral, the large gilded statue of Mary gazed down on her crucified son, her arms stretched downward as if in appeal.
Stefan pointed to our left, the northern end of the square, which was bordered by a large, elegant building. “Speaking of wealth, here’s one of the livrées.”
“The what?” The word he’d said rhymed with eBay, but I knew that wasn’t right.
“Livrées. The cardinals’ palaces.” The building was immense — twice the size of the White House, maybe three times. “There were more than twenty livrées here and across the river in Villeneuve. Today, only two livrées are still standing in Avignon. This one, the Petit Palais — the Little Palace — is now a museum. Beautiful medieval paintings inside. The other one is the bibliothèque, the public library. You have seen it, oui?” I nodded. “Come. I have two other places to show you on our moonlight tour of the city of the popes.”
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