Heretic Dawn

by Robert Merle

  The flood of people flowing into the streets and alleys carried us along from the Saint-Denis quarter to the Île de la Cité, so that, other than the comfort of being seated, there was no advantage to riding in a coach, since the crowds in front and behind us were so thick that, even had they been able to, they were not at all inclined to let us pass, their numbers redoubling their natural effrontery. As for the comfort I just alluded to, it too was confiscated at the Pont aux Meuniers, which we weren’t allowed to cross, a sergeant of the French guards politely informing us that no carriages could be admitted onto the Île de la Cité given the great crush of vehicles and people that were already there. So we had to get out of the coach and submit to the curious stares and ribald humour of the Parisians, who were very happy to see us reduced to the same status as themselves. Of course, as we walked along, they gawked at the women with a degree of impertinence all too easy to imagine, and began loudly praising their various attributes, the ladies feigning not to hear a word of their coarse remarks. Quéribus and I walked on either side of them to keep the rabble from enacting their taunts, and Miroul and the coachman protected them from behind, without which they doubtless would have been in danger of being groped by the crowd, so great was the insolence and lubricity of this mob. Nor could we do anything to rein them in, since Quéribus and I were so pressed on either side that we would have had no room to draw our swords to answer and correct their manners.

  Eventually, in the midst of all this heat and these sweating bodies, whose odour was nearly nauseating, we came up to the huge platform that had been erected in front of the porch of Notre-Dame, where Henri de Navarre and Princesse Margot would receive their nuptial benediction. This platform was raised to the usual height that would allow the populace to watch a public spectacle, be it a circus, a public execution or, in this case, a royal wedding, for which occasion it had been covered with thick tapestries that must have been brought from the Louvre at daybreak.

  A thick cordon of Swiss guards and French guards, some belonging to the king and some belonging to the Duc d’Anjou, the latter recognizable by their red jackets, surrounded the platform. Heading towards them, we were delighted to come upon Captain de Montesquiou, who looked at us with but a hint of a smile.

  “If you please, Captain,” said Quéribus, “get us out of this crush. The smell alone will kill us!”

  “I know you well, Monsieur,” replied Montesquiou sternly, “and I know Monsieur de Siorac, but these ladies are unknown to me.”

  “They’re both noblewomen from Normandy,” answered Quéribus without batting an eye, “and I answer for them as for myself.”

  This lie led me to think that in his mind he’d already made his choice and that he’d selected Zara, since a chambermaid would never have been admitted onto the platform, where already a number of brilliant courtiers and ladies were taking their places on the benches. It was certainly a relief to be seated, but, under the terrible, leaden heat of the sun, a number of ladies had already begun to complain, fearing it would ruin their complexions, but also because they were suffocating under the tight bodices that they’d worn to appear more comely. I have to admit that even without such a constraint I was cooking like a loaf of bread in an oven. All buttoned up as I was, and sporting a high collar, I could feel the perspiration dripping from my face, and yet I felt fortunate to be there with these two women and to have the chance to see up close the characters in this great drama.

  In a great flurry of pages and officers, and a loud fanfare of trumpets, church bells tolling wildly and an explosion of cannon shots, the king appeared, and on his arm the queen mother, followed by his queen. He was dressed in pale-yellow satin, on which a sun with its rays was figured by a series of golden threads and precious stones. Catherine de’ Medici, having for once abandoned the black mourning clothes she’d worn since the death of Henri II, appeared in a sumptuous blue silk gown, covered—and I mean covered—from head to toe with her celebrated Florentine jewels, the most beautiful in the world, radiating beams from their thousands of facets to such a degree that they seemed to rob the very sunlight from her son, just as, in truth, she had, from the very day of his coronation, robbed him of the real power of the throne.

  Behind the king came his brothers, the Duc d’Anjou and the Duc d’Alençon, clothed as he was in pale-yellow satin, as was also Henri de Navarre, who followed them. I doubted, however, that any of the three could be seen by the populace, since the queen mother’s many officers and her twelve ladies-in-waiting (of the twenty-four in her squadron) so crowded the front of the platform as to render the rest of the company invisible.

  The king and queen mother were half-heartedly greeted by the people, who, like Alizon, seemed half scolding and half happy, and, on the whole, divided between the pleasure this royal ceremony afforded them and the bitter resentment they felt about this “infamous” marriage that had been forced down their throats.

  These meagre acclamations were stifled when Margot made her appearance, splendidly adorned, arriving from the archbishop’s palace, where, according to the rumours that were flying about, she’d spent the night tortured by bad dreams (since she still loved Guise). She was presented by the Cardinal de Bourbon, who’d been fooled, or pretended to be, by the dispatch from Rome that Catherine de’ Medici had fabricated.

  Margot, properly Marguerite de France, was clothed in a dress of deep-red velvet, decorated with fleurs-de-lis embroidered in gold, her shoulders weighed down beneath a magnificent velvet mantle, with a train that was four yards long, held by three princesses. On her head, an imperial crown, shining with pearls, diamonds and rubies, jewels that also decorated the ermine bodice that she wore over her dress and that must have added to the unbearable heat of the sun, as I imagined from the way perspiration was flowing down her cheeks. She stood there, immobile in her triumph, enthusiastically applauded by the populace, wearing a very unhappy expression to signify urbi et orbi that this marriage gave her little pleasure. It got to the point that the poor Cardinal de Bourbon, to get her to move forward, had to take her by the hand and more or less drag her behind him like Iphiginia going to her death. Seeing this, the populace, believing that Margot refused to marry a heretic, and believing that it was zeal rather than physical repugnance, redoubled its cheers, both sympathizing with the sad fate of the princesse and at the same time admiring her magnificent finery.

  Not that she was, to speak the unvarnished truth, as beautiful as Pierre de Bourdeille, lord of Brantôme, has described her, calling her on this occasion “the marvel of heaven on earth”. As everyone knows, for our good Périgordian neighbour Brantôme, it’s enough for one to be of royal blood for him to label one as unique and without equal. I found the princesse pleasant to look at: her face was round, her eyes were large—but they protruded like her mother’s, and her expression was set in a perpetual pout, so that, if it hadn’t been for all the finery, the only thing I would have admired in her was the extreme appetite for life that emanated from her lively and eloquent eyes—a feature that gave her what I might call a devilish beauty, and, in my view, quite justly so, as the rest of my story will illustrate.

  “See how bored Charles is!” whispered Quéribus in my ear. “I’ll wager he’d like to be a thousand leagues from here. Hunting, playing tennis, working in his forge, playing his trumpets or running through the streets at night with the Bâtard d’Angoulême and Guise, playing a thousand tricks on passers-by.”

  “What? He does that?” I whispered back.

  “He’s done worse,” hissed Quéribus. “He’s so childish. The Duc d’Anjou once found him in his apartments on all fours, with a saddle on his back, whinnying like a horse.”

  I laughed at this.

  “Monsieur my brother,” said Dame Gertrude du Luc, tapping me on the hand with her fan, “you and the baron are sharing secrets.”

  “Which are all about you, my friend,” I whispered in her ear. “He told me he finds you very beautiful.”

  “Ha!” said G
ertrude out loud, fanning herself and leaning over to smile at him. “Then why doesn’t he sit next to me?”

  “But I’d be delighted to!” gushed Quéribus, and, getting right to his feet, he changed places with me so that I had Zara on my left and the baron on my right, who wanted to remain seated next to me so he could continue to share his witty observations about the royal family in his very unguarded way.

  At this point, the king, who, though dressed as the sun, looked very gloomy indeed, suddenly burst out roguishly:

  “Now then! Let’s get on with it! Where’s Navarre?”

  Whereupon Navarre moved forward, along with the Duc d’Anjou, who was holding his hand and was, so to speak, leading him over to his sister to give her to him in marriage.

  The sight of Navarre immediately raised the hackles of the crowd, who emitted something like a groan, which immediately died in their throats when they spied Anjou, who was second only to Guise in the hearts of the Parisians, because he’d defeated the Huguenots at Jarnac and at Moncontour. So, in the end, unsure whether to boo Navarre or cheer for the Duc d’Anjou, the populace fell silent, very bewildered that it should be Anjou himself who was throwing his sister into the clutches of the Devil.

  I was able to inspect Navarre at my leisure as he made his bows and compliments to the king, to Catherine de’ Medici and to his future spouse (who remained as stony as marble and made no reply whatsoever). He was clothed in pale-yellow satin like the king and his brothers, and though at his late mother’s request he had made a great effort for this marriage to hide his rustic origins, I had to admit that his bearing had something unpolished about it that suggested more a labourer or a soldier than a courtier.

  But though his face, with his long nose, was hardly handsome, there was in his expression an air of false naivety, of finesse and of sarcasm, that gave me food for thought.

  “So, what do you think of the groom?” whispered Quéribus in my ear.

  “Monsieur,” I replied with a smile, “although the bumpkin speaks langue d’oc, I think he’s got more finesse than buffoonery about him.”

  “Clever he most assuredly is,” laughed Quéribus, “and even more so than Catherine, who thinks she can chain him to his throne and thus attach him to France by giving him her daughter, whose thighs, Catherine believes, will take him prisoner. But, God’s truth! Those thighs are too light to put lead in Navarre’s shoes!”

  “Monsieur,” I observed, “your metaphor is like the Princesse de Montpensier: she’s beautiful but she limps.”

  He laughed out loud at this and threw his arm around my shoulder, but gave a quick look around to see if anyone had been able to hear our damnable words. But in truth, the ladies and lords seated around us, and seated so close together that their knees were touching the backs of those in front of them, were all, like us, too occupied in their gossip to hear us, so true is it that slander, no matter how politely expressed, is the daily sustenance of every heart.

  Seeing us laughing, our ladies took us to task for being more caught up with our own conversation than with them; of the two, the more imperious by far was Zara, who, from the minute she had clothed herself in an aristocrat’s clothes, had adopted aristocratic manners and now commanded me in a whisper to explain exactly who this Montpensier woman was whom we were laughing about.

  “You mean you don’t know, Zara?” I replied, giving her a little kiss on her neck, under the pretext of speaking in her pretty little ear. “It’s Guise’s sister and the most zealous papist in the entire kingdom!”

  “Monsieur,” said Zara, batting her eyelashes and bending her long neck towards me—little gestures that she knew delighted me, “don’t speak ill of the papists!”

  “Don’t tell me,” I hissed, “that you’re a turncoat!”

  “Monsieur,” she explained, “I’m of the religion of the person who loves me: Huguenot with d’Assas, Catholic with Dame Gertrude. But Monsieur, where is the Duc de Guise? I’m told he’s very handsome.”

  I was unable to answer her, for at that moment there was a great stir on the platform, since the king, having stood up, was heading towards the porch of the cathedral to go to hear Mass, while Navarre, who refused to hear it, was heading towards the cloister of the archbishop’s palace (which stood to the left of Notre-Dame), and was immediately followed by the Prince de Condé, Admiral de Coligny, his son-in-law Téligny, the Comte de La Rochefoucauld and a number of other great Protestant lords. As for the future wife of Navarre, she had taken the arm of the Duc d’Anjou, who was to play the role of husband during the Mass.

  The platform was suddenly all flux and reflux: the flux of the papists entering the nave and the reflux of the Huguenots heading to the cloister to stroll about during the Mass, waiting for it to end and for the return of Margot to the platform, where, outside the church, the nuptial benediction would be bestowed on this strange couple who had separated into their respective religions before being united before God.

  “Assuredly,” Quéribus whispered to me as we followed Margot on Anjou’s arm, “the lady, rather than marry her bumpkin Navarre, would prefer, given Guise’s unavailability, to marry her brother as the Pharaohs did. You’ve no doubt heard, even out in the provinces, about how crazy she was about him when she was younger?”

  “What?” I gulped. “Isn’t that just a nasty rumour? Where did you get it from?”

  “From an excellent source—Margot herself!”

  “And the Duc d’Anjou?”

  “Well, Anjou has been pursuing her with a hateful love ever since she opened herself to Guise. The king as well. And Alençon. The Florentine ways don’t change. Margot is loved by her three brothers, but in the Italian way: jealously.”

  Terrified by these licentious words, I threw a quick look around us and saw that the fraternal couple, as they walked up the nave, were watched by the entire court with smiles, sneers and whispers, which said a very great amount about the very small amount of respect that these bowing and scraping courtiers accorded their prince. “Well,” I thought, “now I understand why the people of Paris are so rebellious and insolent, like their Maillotin forebears. The example comes from above.”

  Huguenot though I was, I’d never had such great scruples about entering a Catholic church that I couldn’t overcome them out of respect for others, and could not in good conscience abandon my brother Quéribus and the ladies at the door. But without meaning to offend anyone who shares the king’s religion, I found this Mass interminable despite its pageantry. It lasted four deadly hours and one would have thought that the canons of the cathedral had extended it simply to annoy Navarre and the reformists, who were forced to walk back and forth in the cloister of the archbishop’s palace all that time, subjected to the threats and hoots of the crowd outside, who, however noble they believed themselves, would doubtless have stormed the cloister and torn them limb from limb with their bare hands had the Swiss and French guards not kept them from doing so. But from what I heard later, their dirty and offensive words did what their hands could not, and there was no insult or threat that wasn’t thrown from without, such as, “Hey, you heretical dogs! Wicked devils! Satan’s henchmen! You don’t want to hear the Mass? We’ll force it on you sooner or later!” Of course, from our side, the insults were no more respectful or thoughtful, and from within the cloister came nasty jokes about Mary and all the saints, which they would have done much better to stifle given the flames of strident hatred that they fanned that afternoon, and that ultimately burst forth from these hot paving stones into a full-fledged massacre.

  But I saw nothing of all that, for I was hearing Mass for the second time in my life, but in the cathedral of Notre-Dame, where mitred priests, decked out in resplendent chasubles, presented a ceremony that outdid in its splendour the very pomp of the royal court. I’d never seen such a gaudy spectacle; and certainly, if I considered only what I could see and hear (for the music and chants were very melodious), I would have been swept away by the marvellous beauty of this rite, if
I hadn’t found in it—raised as I had been in the spartan cult of the Huguenots—such a vainglorious display, so worldly and so superfluous that it couldn’t fail to irritate me every bit as much as I enjoyed it. And what pleasure there was diminished to nothing as the interminable ceremony dragged on.

  On the concluding words of the Mass, “ite missa est”, we emerged from the cool vaults of the cathedral and took our places once more on the platform in front of the porch. The sun was at its zenith, and the heat was unbearable. The king and the queen mother took their places at the centre of the platform on two fauteuils, and Margot knelt before the king on one of the two prayer stools that had been brought out during the Mass. The Duc d’Anjou stood aside, his face inscrutable, and sent Montmorency to bring Navarre, who, returning from the cloister, followed by his Huguenots, came and knelt down beside Margot, facing the Cardinal de Bourbon, the bishop of Digne and two Italian priests who’d been found God knows where, and who were placed there to convince the people that the Pope had indeed given his blessing.

  Margot was extremely pale, her lips set in a pout, her face sullen; and at the moment the cardinal asked her if she consented to take Henri de Bourbon, king of Navarre for her husband, she didn’t say a word or even make a sound, but remained kneeling, head held high, her face stony, her eyes staring straight ahead, more mute and immobile than a log—perhaps merely to express her repugnance, or perhaps in the hope that the Church would later annul the marriage. You can imagine the stupor and scandal that spread throughout the assembly and caused all of us to fall silent, our breath suspended—though not for long. For the queen mother, unfazed, leant over and said a few words to the king, who, rising to his feet in anger, grabbed Margot by the back of the neck with the rough hands that had so cruelly beaten her when her business with Guise had been discovered, and forced her head forward, bending her neck and violently pushing down into an attitude that, however forced it was, the Cardinal de Bourbon was able to interpret as a sign of assent. Pursuing the benediction in its majestic Latin, he pronounced the sacramental words that united the happy couple “for better or for worse”—the “worse” having just been brutally illustrated for us.