The Royal Succession

by Maurice Druon

  ‘And now, Monseigneur Robert,’ said Jean de Varennes, ‘which road do you wish to take? Do we go first to Saint-Pol, or straight to Arras? Artois is all yours, you have but to choose.’

  ‘Which road leads to Hesdin?’

  ‘The one you’re on, Monseigneur, which goes by Frévent.’

  ‘Very well, I wish to go first to the castle of my fathers.’

  The knights looked a little uneasy. It was most unfortunate that the Count of Artois should wish to go to Hesdin immediately on his arrival.

  ‘The fact is, Monseigneur,’ said Souastre, the knight who was wearing the naked woman on his helmet, ‘the fact is that the castle is in no fit state to receive you.’

  ‘What’s that? Is it still occupied by the Sire de Brosse, whom my cousin the Hutin installed there?’

  ‘No, no; we put Jean de Brosse to flight; but we also sacked the castle a little in the process.’

  ‘Sacked it?’ said Robert. ‘You have not burnt it down, I trust?’

  ‘No, Monseigneur, no; the walls are perfectly sound.’

  ‘But you’ve done a bit of pillaging, eh, my pretty gentlemen? Well, if that’s all, you did well. All that belongs to that sow Mahaut, that slut Mahaut, that bitch Mahaut, is yours, Messeigneurs, and I make you a gift of it.’

  How could they not love so generous a lord! Once again they roared long life to their noble Count Robert, and the army of the rebellion set out for Hesdin.

  Towards the end of the afternoon they reached the fortified town of the Counts of Artois, with its fourteen towers, where the castle alone occupied the enormous expanse of some twelve acres.

  What taxes, what labour and what sweat this fabulous building had cost the common people of the neighbourhood, though they had been told it was to protect them against the disasters of war! Wars had succeeded each other, but the protection seemed far from effective, and since armies were always fighting for the castle, the population preferred to go to ground in their cob-built houses, praying God that the avalanche might pass to one side.

  There were few people in the streets to cheer their Seigneur Robert; the inhabitants, who had suffered enough during the sack the day before, were in hiding. A few of the more craven had come out to shout a little, but their acclamations were thin.

  The approaches to the castle were not a pleasant sight; the royal garrison, hanged from the battlements, were beginning to stink a little of carrion. At the great gate, called the Porte des Poulets, the drawbridge had been lowered. Inside was a scene of desolation: in the cellars wine was running from the broken vats; dead chickens were lying all over the place; from the stables came the sad lowing of unmilked cows; and on the bricks, which paved the interior courtyards, a rare luxury at the period, the story of the recent massacre could be read in great patches of dried blood.

  The buildings that housed the apartments of the family of Artois consisted of fifty rooms, and none of them had been spared by Robert’s good friends. Everything which had not been taken away to adorn the neighbouring manors had been smashed on the spot.

  From the chapel the great silver-gilt Cross and the bust of Saint Louis, containing a fragment of the King’s bone and a few of his hairs, had disappeared. So had the gold chalice which Ferry de Picquigny had purloined. Later he sold it and it was discovered in a Paris shop. The twelve volumes of the library and the chessmen of jasper and chalcedony had been stolen. With Mahaut’s dresses, dressing-gowns and linen, the little lords had provided handsome presents for their lady loves and had inexpensively prepared for themselves warm nights of gratitude. Even the kitchen stores of pepper, ginger, saffron and cinnamon had been looted.22

  They walked over broken dishes and torn brocades; everywhere bed-curtains had been torn down, furniture hacked to pieces and tapestries destroyed. The leaders of the rebellion were somewhat abashed as they followed Robert on his tour; but at every new discovery the giant burst out into such loud and sincere laughter that they soon felt cheered again.

  In the hall of escutcheons Mahaut had arranged along the walls stone statues of the Counts and Countesses of Artois from their beginnings to herself. The faces were all a little alike, but the total effect was one of grandeur.

  ‘Here, Monseigneur,’ declared Picquigny, who had something of a bad conscience, ‘we wished to touch nothing.’

  ‘And you were wrong, my friend,’ replied Robert, ‘for I see among these statues at least one head which displeases me. Lormet! A mace!’

  Taking the heavy mace from his valet, he whirled it three times round his head and brought it down with all his strength on Mahaut’s face. The statue reeled on its base and the head, broken at the neck, was shivered on the flagstones.

  ‘May the living head suffer the same fate when all the allies of Artois have well pissed on it!’ cried Robert.

  If you like breaking things, it’s just a matter of making a start; the mace seemed to have a friendly weight in the scarlet-clothed giant’s hand.

  ‘Ah, my sow of an aunt, you robbed me of Artois because he who begot me …’

  And he sent the head flying from the statue of his father, Count Philippe.

  ‘… was foolish enough to die before this one …’

  And he decapitated his grandfather, Count Robert II.

  ‘… and I shall perhaps live among these statues which you ordered, to do yourself an honour to which you had no right! Down with my ancestors! We shall begin all over again and not with stolen wealth.’

  The walls trembled; the stone lay scattered about the floor. The barons of Artois had fallen silent, breathless at the spectacle of the monumental fury of this man who far surpassed them in the art of violence. How could they not give such a leader their passionate devotion!

  When he had finished decapitating his family, Count Robert III threw his mace through a window-pane, and said, stretching himself: ‘Now we are ready to talk. Messires, my friends, my trusty companions, I desire that in each town, provostship and castellany which we deliver from the yoke of Mahaut and those damned Hirsons, all complaints against her should be noted down, and the register of her wickedness precisely kept, so that an exact tally of it may be sent to her son-in-law, Messire of the Closed Gates – for wherever he appears, that man, he encloses everything, towns, conclaves, the Treasury – to Messire Short-of-Sight, our good Lord Philippe the Myope,23 who calls himself Regent and for whose benefit we were deprived, fourteen years ago, of this county, in order that he might grow fat with Burgundy! May the beast die of it, his throat strangled with his own guts!’

  Little Gérard Kiérez, who was clever in all the chicanery of legal proceedings, and who had pleaded before the King the cause of the barons against Mahaut, then said: ‘There is a grave matter, Monseigneur, which is of interest not only to Artois, but to the whole kingdom, and perhaps the Regent might not be indifferent to knowing how his brother, Louis X, died.’

  ‘By the living devil, Gérard, do you believe what I believe myself? Have you any proof that my aunt had an evil hand in that affair too?’

  ‘Proof, proof, Monseigneur, it’s easy enough to talk of proof; but a strong suspicion certainly, which can be supported by evidence. I know a woman at Arras who calls herself Isabelle de Fériennes and her son, Jean, both sellers of magic potions, who supplied a certain Demoiselle d’Hirson, Béatrice …’

  ‘One day I’ll make you a present of that one,’ said Robert. ‘I know her and, judging from her looks, she’d be a treat in bed!’

  ‘The Fériennes gave her a good poison to kill deer for Madame Mahaut, not more than two weeks before the King died. What can serve for deer can serve also for a king.’

  The barons’ chuckles showed that they understood and appreciated this allusion.

  ‘In any case it was a poison for the wearers of horns,’ said Robert, outdoing him. ‘God keep my cuckold of a cousin’s soul!’

  The laughter grew louder.

  ‘And it seems all the more likely, Messire Robert,’ went on Kiérez, ‘because
the Dame de Fériennes was boasting last year that she compounded the philtre which reconciled Messire Philippe, whom you call the Myope, and Madame Jeanne, Mahaut’s daughter …’

  ‘She’s a bitch like her mother, and you did wrong, my Barons, not to have strangled her like a viper when you had her at your mercy here last autumn,’ said Robert. ‘I want this woman Fériennes and I want her son. See that they are captured as soon as we reach Arras. And now we shall eat: the day has given me a great appetite. Kill the biggest ox in the stable and have it roasted whole; empty the pond of Mahaut’s carp; and bring us such wine as you have not already drunk.’

  Two hours later, when night had fallen, all the fine company was roaring drunk. Robert sent Lormet, who carried the mixture of wines pretty well, with a good escort, to round up as many women as the gallant humour of the barons demanded. As they pulled them from their beds, they did not look too closely to see whether they were maids or mothers of families. Lormet drove a flock of them in their nightshirts, bleating with terror, to the castle. There was a fine sabbath in Mahaut’s pillaged rooms. The women’s screams lent ardour to the knights, who went to the assault as if they were charging the infidel, rivalling each other in their prowess in pleasure, and hurling themselves three at a time on the same prize. Robert seized by the hair the choicest morsels for himself, stripping them roughly enough. As he weighed over two hundred pounds, his conquests had not even breath enough to scream. Meanwhile Souastre, who had mislaid his splendid helmet, was doubled up, his hands to his stomach, vomiting like a gargoyle in a thunderstorm.

  Then, one by one, these valiant gentlemen began to snore. A single man would have had no trouble in cutting the throats of all the nobility of Artois that night.

  The next day an unsteady army, tongues furred and minds foggy, set out for Arras where Robert had decided to set up his headquarters. He himself seemed as fresh as a pike straight from the river, which once and for all earned him the admiration of his troops. The journey was broken with halts, for Mahaut possessed several other castles in the neighbourhood, the sight of which reawakened the barons’ courage.

  But when, on Saint Magdalene’s Day, Robert reached Arras, the Dame de Fériennes had disappeared.

  2

  The Pope’s Lombard

  AT LYONS THE CARDINALS were still shut up. They had thought to weary the Regent; their seclusion had lasted for more than a month. The seven hundred men-at-arms of the Count de Forez continued to mount guard round the church and monastery of the Predicant Friars; and if, from respect for precedent, Count Savelli, Marshal of the Conclave, carried the keys permanently on his person, they were of little use, since the doors they opened had all been walled up.

  The Cardinals daily transgressed the Constitution of Gregory, but their consciences were quiet, for they had been compelled to meet by force. Nor did they fail to point this out daily to the Count de Forez, when he put his helmeted head in through the narrow opening which served to pass in their food. To which the Count de Forez daily replied that he had been given orders to see that the law of the Conclave should be respected. They could each go on talking to deaf ears indefinitely.

  The Cardinals had ceased living together, as was prescribed, for, though the nave of the Jacobins was large, a hundred people living there, with straw for bedding, had soon become intolerable. The stench created during the first nights was hardly encouraging to the election of a Pope. The prelates had therefore taken possession of the monastery which abutted on the church and was within the precincts. Turning out the monks, they had organized themselves three to a cell, which was not much more comfortable. The pages had forcibly occupied a dormitory, and the chaplains the hospice, which no longer received travellers.

  The rule of diminishing rations of food had not been applied either; had it been, they would by now have been an assembly of skeletons. The Cardinals, therefore, had sent in from outside certain luxuries which were supposed to be for the Abbot. The secrecy of the deliberations was constantly being violated; every day letters either came in to the Conclave or went out from it, hidden in bread or in empty dishes. Meal-time had become the hour for the post, and the correspondence which claimed to rule the fate of Christendom was sadly stained with grease.

  The Count of Forez had informed the Regent of all these inobservances, but the latter had replied to let things be. ‘The more faults and inobservances they commit,’ declared Philippe of Poitiers, ‘the better position we shall be in to treat them with rigour when we decide to do so. As for the letters, pretend to let them go on their way, but open them as often as you can, and let me know their contents.’

  Thus it was known that there had been four candidatures which failed almost as soon as they were put forward: in the first place that of Arnaud Nouvel, ex-Abbot of Fontfroide, concerning whom the Count of Poitiers let it be known through Jean de Forez ‘that he did not consider this Cardinal friendly enough to the kingdom of France’, then the candidatures of Guillaume de Mandagout, Cardinal of Prenestre, Arnaud de Pélagrue and Bérenger Frédol the elder. Gascons and Provençaux held each other in check. It was also learned that the redoubtable Caetani was beginning to disgust some of the Italians, including even his own cousin Stefaneschi, by the baseness of his intrigues and the frenzied excesses of his calumnies.

  Had he not suggested as a joke – but it was known what his jokes were like! – that they should raise the Devil and place the selection of a Pope in his hands, since God seemed to have decided not to make a choice?

  To which Duèze, in his whispering voice, had replied: ‘It would not be the first time, Francesco, that Satan sat among us.’

  When Caetani asked for a candle, it was murmured that it was not to give himself light, but to use the wax for casting a spell.

  Until they had been shut up, the Cardinals had opposed each other from motives of doctrine, prestige or interest. But, having lived together for a month cramped in a limited space, they had begun to hate each other for personal reasons, physical reasons almost. Some neglected their appearance, had not shaved for four weeks, and were dirty in their habits. It was no longer by promises of money or ecclesiastical benefices that a candidate sought to acquire votes, but by sharing his rations with the gluttons, an action which was strictly prohibited. Denunciations went the rounds: ‘The Camerlingo has again eaten three of his party’s dinners,’ it was murmured.

  These extras kept their stomachs more or less satisfied; it was not the same for their chastity, to which certain Cardinals were little used to submit, and which began to sour some of their characters unpleasantly. There was a joke going the rounds among the Provençaux:

  ‘Monseigneur d’Auch’, they said, ‘suffers from abstemiousness in flesh while Messeigneurs Colonna suffer both from abstemiousness and the flesh.’

  For the two Colonna brothers, physically athletic and better suited to the coat of mail than the soutane, lay in wait for pages in the passages of the monastery, promising them good absolution.

  They never stopped throwing old grievances at each other’s heads.

  ‘If you had not canonized Célestin … If you had not denied Boniface … If you had not agreed to leave Rome … If you had not condemned the Templars …’

  They mutually accused each other of weakness in defence of the Church, ambition and venality. To hear the Cardinals talk of each other, one might have thought that not one among them deserved so much as a country cure.

  Monseigneur Duèze alone seemed unaware of the discomfort, the intrigues and the back-biting. For two years he had so embroiled his colleagues that he now had no need to interfere, and could leave the perversities he had implanted in their minds to do their work on their own. Having very little appetite, the meagre allowance of food in no way inconvenienced him. He had chosen to share his cell with the two Norman Cardinals who had joined the Provençal party, Nicolas de Fréauville, once confessor to Philip the Fair, and Michel du Bec, whom no one was proposing as candidates. They were too weak to form a party of their
own. No one feared them, and their living with Duèze could not take on the appearance of a conspiracy. Besides, Duèze saw but little of his two companions. At a given hour he strolled in the monastery cloisters, generally leaning on the arm of Guccio, who was continually warning him: ‘Monseigneur, don’t walk so quickly! Look, I can hardly keep up with you, my leg is still so stiff from my accident in Marseilles when I fell from Queen Clémence’s ship. You know well that your chances, if I can trust what I hear, will be better the more people think that you are weak.’

  ‘It’s true, it’s true, you’re quite right,’ replied the Cardinal, who then did his best to stoop, totter at the knees and discipline his seventy-two years.

  He spent the rest of the time reading or writing. He had managed to procure what was more necessary to him than anything else in the world: books, candle and paper. When he was summoned to a meeting in the choir of the church, he pretended only to be able to tear himself with difficulty from his work, dragged himself to his stall, and there, thoroughly enjoying hearing his colleagues insult and betray each other, he contented himself with whispering: ‘I pray, my brothers; I pray that God will inspire us to make a worthy choice.’

  Those who knew him well found him altered. He seemed steeped in Christian virtues, much given to mortifications of the flesh, and set an example of kindliness and charity. When someone remarked on it, he would reply simply with a murmur and a gesture of disillusion: ‘The approach of death … it is high time I prepared myself …’

  He hardly touched his bowl at meal-times and had it carried to one or another of his colleagues, excusing himself for breaking the rule for reasons of health. Thus Guccio would go, his hands laden, to the Camerlingo, who was prospering like a fatted ox, and say to him: ‘Monseigneur Duèze is sending you this. He thought you were looking thin this morning.’

  Of the ninety-six prisoners, Guccio could communicate the most easily with the outside world; he had indeed quickly been able to establish contact with the agent of the Tolomei bank at Lyons. Through this agency passed not only the letters Guccio wrote his uncle, but also the most secret correspondence between Duèze and the Regent. These letters were spared the disgrace of journeying in greasy dishes; they were transmitted inside the books which were so indispensable to the Cardinal’s pious studies.