At one point while clip-clopping down that knobbly spinal column which is the Roman road from Orléans, I began to hallucinate from fatigue and the flow of tree trunks dazzled and confused my eye like the riffled pages of a book. The sun dissolved in a brownish mist pierced by rays which seemed to assemble with the trees in shapes of giant weaponry, flying ships, Babylonian towers innumerable storeys high. I had a sensation of speed, light, a scission of sensibility and—most horrifyingly—of impermanence. It was a vision of hell, I decided, as the shapes changed, reshaped and changed again. Change and impermanence are, after all, the very properties of the devil.
For the last two days of my journey I was raving with fever. I arrived—I’ve been told since—pale as a parsnip and gaunt as a cormorant at Radegunda’s door. Certainly I was in a receptive state. She fed me and flattered me, telling me how she had always preferred poets to all other guests when she was still King Clotair’s wife.
“Not that any who came were of your stature!”
Chilperic’s letter—out of vanity?—had promoted me.
She confessed she wrote verse herself. A mania, I decided. First Chilperic, now his stepmother. Well, maybe it was their way of seeking order. But when she showed me the convent, I saw she had managed to create order in practice. Its perfection actually pained me. It was so calm, so pleasantly predictable, the sort of haven in which I would have dreamed, if my dreams had been good ones, of living. The nuns wear white robes and clogs, eat sparingly so as to keep down the passions of the flesh, drink watered wine and perry. Everyone helps with the housework. She herself, she told me, worked in the kitchen garden. She was not the abbess. Agnes was, her spiritual daughter. A pretty young nun came in: Agnes, asked about my journey and my comfort, then left. A drift of some fragrant herb stayed behind. I was still faintly feverish with images of that foul rattle-bone journey still humped in my inner eye: a mental stew of bad memories. One: vomiting bad food from some inn into a ditch whose porridgy waters suddenly confronted me with an eye, a single one only a hand’s span away from my vomiting face. I had to finish then, seized by convulsions, hold on to a bush to keep from falling in. When I stood up it was still there, nakedly unlidded, staring at me. Too big to be human. A horse’s, perhaps, which someone had gouged out for some whim or pagan practice? Wiping my mouth with a dockleaf, I stumbled back to my waggon. I suppose there was nothing to it really. A horse’s eye? But it kept returning, suspended in front of my own, enlarged, staring at me: the anthropomorphic eye of Savage Gaul. Pagans, I remembered hearing, had been buried with their horses. King Clovis’s father had. Why? I asked my escort but they shrugged. Said they were Christians, didn’t know, spat, mumbled. Their Latin was primitive. One said something in German dialect and the rest laughed.
Suddenly—from the refuge of the convent—going back with those men was horrible to me. I didn’t want to spend another night in their company or on those mangling roads.
“This,” Radegunda was saying, “is our hortus, our kitchen-garden. We have laid it out on the model of a Roman villa’s. I think we have every plant here that you would find there. This is where I work so you must allow me to be a little vain.”
She showed me myrtle, wallflower, lupins, tansy, fennel, dill, burdock, mint, chervil, spurge and a hundred other plants. The paths were straight and weeded, the stone benches clean. A nun brought honey-cakes and perry. Through a window I could hear a psalm. When it stopped I could sense feminine presences moving somewhere out of sight in silent conformity to some unchanging time-table.
“This”, I told the nun, “is a poem you have created here. It scans beautifully.”
She had been joking with me before, playing the hostess as she likes to do. She can often be silly. It is a release, I think, a relief after the concentration of prayer. Now she gave me a sober look from those odd German eyes of hers which are often unfocused as though the focus were somewhere beyond reach. I already knew she saw visions. I had heard stories about her at court and along the way in unreliable inns where they talk with equal credulity about strygae whose powers can only be destroyed if one eats their hearts and about miraculous cures effected by saints. I must say I had been repelled and had not really been looking forward to meeting Radegunda. But there is nothing of the village freak in her. She has a German intensity but is as cultivated as a Roman matron. Only that curious blue of her eyes, reflected in the hollows of her cheeks and brimming in the shadows thrown by her veil, distinguished her from one. I was reminded of those heretics who believed that light was gathered in the bodies of saintly people whose virtue managed slowly to eliminate all the darkness within them until, ultimately, they rejoined a realm of pure primeval felicity and light. There is a transparency about Radegunda. Bluish veins show through her skin and one could see, looking at her, how the heresy might persuade.
“This is an image of heaven,” I told her.
“How do you imagine heaven?”
“As ordered, unchanging. Like your convent.”
“Do you think it wrong to withdraw and seek one’s own salvation?”
I said I didn’t see how it could be, she that she had often worried about this. Before founding the convent she had run an alms-house and a hospital.
“But I gave up. I decided the good we could do was hopelessly limited. How could it be just to cure one sick person and refuse hundreds? Yet that was what we had constantly to do. It made us angry. It made us unable to pray. Then, too, I decided that since men’s bodies live only a short time and their souls forever, I would do better to pray for their souls than to bring their bodies a wretched and partial help. Sometimes I think this world is hell. I would believe it but have been told it is a heresy.”
There was a coherence about her which made me aware of how hesitant and diffuse my own life was. She began to talk about the impermanence of matter—hardly a discovery but this fact was so physically real to her that it became so to me. Radegunda is the most physically compelling person I have met. When she picks a flower as she did next—some blue flower, a large luscious thing with a golden centre—and says “This flower will fade,” it begins to wilt. Suggestion? Hypnotism? Miracle? I don’t know. I saw the great soft, almost animal thing—it had furry purple protuberances like a hound’s dewlaps—shrivel and dry.
“Look,” she said. “I could hate beauty. It is a mockery, a comforting lie told to a sick man since it will wither in his hands. It is like the grain we mix with poison to kill slugs. I would truly hate it if I did not see it as as an image of permanent beauty. If I didn’t see this flower as a reflection of a heavenly flower, I would crush it.”
Her voice was cold, almost bitter. The shadows in her face were the colour of the flower. Her own beauty was at that most poignant stage: almost gone, returning at brief moments to flood and replump her face. Like an after-image. A turn of her head and it had disappeared. It was surely growing rarer in its returns. I looked at the flower. Had she been vain? Her intensity had worn out her body before its time.
“Have you”, I risked, “no appetites?”
“They are my torments. I stifle them. I delight in tormenting them as they would me. They come from the devil.” She laughed. She could have been describing a sport.
“Don’t you enjoy life at all?”
“Oh, indeed. This life is a trial. One must face one’s trial with gallantry. Here we live our life gaily but without becoming attached to it. The balance is delicate.”
She gave me a great foaming splash of smile, spontaneous and humourless. I looked at her suspiciously.
“Gaily? Is the convent gay?”
“Very. Stay with us and you’ll see. My nuns are my plants. I delight in their growth. When our community expands, I am almost sorry since it means we know each other less well. But it is a sign of our success. And we can’t refuse women who need to come here. You know what dangers women face in Gaul today! I don’t mean sin!” A shrewd narrowing of the lips. “One can commit that in a convent. I mean quite brutal
dangers.”
I forget the rest. She has made this speech so often since, I may even be remembering things she said some other time to a new batch of novices or to some visitor. Radegunda is a balanced person. Her life is neatly divided into the mundane and the transcendent. Mine is not. Listening to her I found her rejections of the body had the effect of conjuring it up for me in its quintessential fleshiness. As if I had been reading Ausonius’s lament for his roses, my limbs tingled for some speedy mortal embrace. Curiously, she had, without meaning to, performed the same trick as he. By reminding me of the death-laden canker common to all human flesh, she had set my own exhilaratingly on fire. The herbal fragrances around me, relief after my journey, the young women I could sense behind the cloister wall, Radegunda’s own renunciatory passion, all combined had set my head boiling in a red curdle of excitement not at all free of religious emotion. I was aware that I had lost the balance she had recommended. I had fallen off the thin line between a stoically gay acceptance of life and wanton revelling in it: fallen neither to one side nor the other but, like a novice walker of tight-ropes, had slipped astraddle so that the thin sharp line had me by the balls.
“Let me stay here,” I begged Radegunda. “I am a light and frivolous man, undirected but eager. I feel that here with you I might achieve unity of thrust.”
She agreed and my last memory of that occasion is holding her cold, dry, disciplined hand and staring at a sky which was pale grey, tinged with salmon like old Gaulish ceramics, while I came as near as I ever do to mental prayer and assured God that it was up to him now to save me from the contradictions he has put into me.
Chapter Five
[A.D. 552]
News of the queen’s coming had preceded her.
Bishop Medardus was in his vestibule wearing his robes and accompanied by the two deacons without whom a bishop might not receive a woman’s visit.
“I hope”, Radegunda greeted him, “that one day, with Christ’s help, the dung of my soul may be cleared by the mystic rake of your prayers.”
He began to talk about her reputation for virtue. “Happy the husband,” said he, “who …”
“I have left him,” said Radegunda. “I am renouncing my worldly family to enter the family of the Church. I am counting on you, my lord bishop, to consecrate me as a deaconness.”
“Your Highness”, the bishop’s voice had changed pitch, “is surely speaking in metaphor.”
“No. I have left Clotair. I must beg your grace to spare me the sound of a title I have renounced. I am your grace’s most devoted daughter in Christ, Radegunda.”
The bishop shot a glance at his deacons. “Oh God,” he shouted, “You have sent me a trial.”
Radegunda smiled.
“Did you”, he asked, “mean what you said just now? You have left the king?”
“I have.”
“Then it is a trial! Madame—you must allow me to call you that. Anything less would be … Does the king know you are here?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” The bishop clasped his hands and unclasped them again. “You have quarelled.” He nodded. “Is he following you?”
“No. He gave me permission to come and money and attendants for the journey. They are resting in your kitchens.”
The bishop sighed. “May we sit down? Is there anything I may do for your bodily comfort before we discuss this matter further?”
She said there was not.
“Very well,” said the bishop in a brisker tone. “You have, naturally, considered the vow you took on entering the holy state of matrimony, its indissoluble nature and the Church’s maternal concern for weaker souls who might be scandalized and led into sin by the sight of a royal lady running away from her husband? I am,” he raised a repressive hand, “for the sake of saving time, prepared to believe the circumstances are exceptional. Has the king established a concubine under the conjugal roof?”
“No, my lord.”
“Threatened your life?”
“No.”
“It is, forgive me, you who are leaving him?”
“It is.”
“I can do nothing for you.” The bishop looked anxious. “I’m sorry.”
“My brother”, said Radegunda slowly, “died with a knife in his back scarcely an hour after warning me that Clotair was planning to kill him. He was my last surviving blood relation. That was not ten days ago.”
“Allow me to extend condolences, heartfelt condolences. I understand your grief. And I know the rest of your family too were … Yes …” The bishop inhaled a deep breath then expelled it. He did not look at his deacons but his body seemed to have sharpened into an organ sensitive to their least blink or tremor. He held this perceptive pose for moments, then: “Unfortunately, Madame, assassination, even if proven,” he began to gabble, expelling the words speedily and as though with distaste, “cannot provide, is not recognized by the Church as providing grounds for …”
“Grounds,” Radegunda exploded, “grounds are not hard to find. Clotair has never lacked for grounds. Or cared for them. He does somersaults on them. Dances all over them! I am his fifth wife. He kept two of my predecessors concurrently and they were sisters. The impediment of consanguinity was overlooked then, my lord bishop. You know that I myself was dragged by force to the altar. The impediment of constraint was overlooked.” She spoke sharply but without heat and as though the case she was stating had not been her own.
“I see”, said the bishop, “your reputation for learning is well grounded. Your reputation for charity—readiness to forgive—may be less so.”
“The king gave me a free permission to leave.”
“He may change his mind.”
“If your lordship consecrates me as a deaconess I shall belong to the Church. He will be unable to claim me back.”
“That is precisely what would create … complications,” said the bishop. “The Church is not a home for runaway wives.”
Radegunda bowed her head. “It was not my intention”, she said, “to blacken my husband. If you had welcomed me as a sheep hungry for the comfort of the fold I would have shown a gentler side of my nature.” She lifted her head and looked at him. “Of a nature which I long to suppress, Oh, my lord, if you know how I yearn to lose myself in God!”
The bishop looked away. “In God … yes,” he said. “You are tired of yourself and of your marriage and looking for a new fold to belong to. A new start. And I am to be the Good Shepherd and welcome you in. I know. I know.”
He looked at his deacons. This involved him in turning his head and looking over first one shoulder, then the other. Abruptly, as though annoyed by this, he beckoned them forward. He then turned his stare towards Radegunda for several minutes: an astute, hard stare. “You”, he said at last, “are trying to use the Church as a convenience.”
“My lord …”
He raised a hand. “You are a grown woman,” he challenged, “not young, the wife of a king, you cannot be as naïve as you pretend nor can you expect me to pretend to be.”
“You are afraid of Clotair?”
The bishop brushed the notion off as though chasing a fly. “No. I believe what you told me. Am I right to do so?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“So the immediate impediment is removed. We are left with the principle.” Again he stared at her, his frown forbidding her to speak. A little wearily he proceeded. He was not a young man and had probably said all this before—or perhaps disliked having to say it at all? He was a strong-faced man—all bone, jaw and cheek-bone with a jagged crag of nose—and compromises may not have agreed with him. But then he was a prince of the Church, whose function was neither quite spiritual nor quite temporal and he must have known what it was to dance from one foot to the other. He told Radegunda about this at some length, gabbling at times, rushing along, occasionally lifting a shoulder or twitching his fingers as his river of reasoning balked then frothed past some repellent obstacle. They were, he said, sitting in a vestibule
and the world too was a vestibule leading to eternity. Agreed? Agreed. But while one was in a vestibule one was in it, was one not? The bishop sighed angrily and the deacons jumped nervously. Radegunda wiped travelling dust from her face with a cloth.
“Yes,” she said soothingly. “Yes, my lord!”
“So we have to cope with the given and the given is human nature. Laws will not be perfect, governments can only be as just as fallen human nature can make them. To expect more would be to deny the fallen nature of Man. Yet we must have government; we must have rules or that fallen nature will break into anarchy. So, there will be hard cases, contradictions … it is our Christian duty to accept them. To refuse them and go off looking for perfection is to fly in the face of God. The Church has given thought to cases like yours. Two centuries ago, the Council of Gangres … Criadus,” the bishop shouted at one of his deacons, “what did the Council decree? About married women … Wake up, boy. The Council of Gangres—or was it some other Council? About them leaving their husbands—Criadus!”
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