The Royal Succession

by Maurice Druon

  The midwife who had brought the child into the world took the chrisom to be placed about the child’s head after the anointing.

  Then the wet-nurse came forward, carrying the King. ‘Oh, what a good-looking girl,’ thought the Constable.

  Madame de Bouville had found for Marie a rose-coloured velvet dress with a little fur at collar and cuffs, and she had long rehearsed the girl in the part she was to play. The baby was wrapped in a robe twice too long for it, over which had been placed a veil of violet silk falling to the ground like a train.

  They moved towards the Château chapel. Equerries led the way, holding lighted candles. The Seneschal de Joinville came last, tottering even between his supporters. Nevertheless he had emerged a little from his usual torpor because the child was called Jean like himself.

  The chapel was hung with tapestries and the stone font decorated with purple velvet. To one side was a table on which had been placed a covering of miniver; on top of this was a fine cloth, and on top of this again silk cushions. The few braziers did not suffice to dispel the damp cold.

  Marie placed the child on the table and unswathed him. She was intent on making no mistakes; her heart was beating, and she was so excited that she could barely recognize the faces about her. Could she ever have imagined that she, a girl expelled from her family, would play so important a part, standing between the Regent of France and the Countess of Artois, at the christening of a king? Dazzled by this reversal of fortune, she was now full of gratitude to Madame de Bouville and had already asked her pardon for her refractoriness of the day before.

  As she was unwrapping the swaddling clothes, she heard the Constable ask her name and whence she came. She felt herself blush.

  The Queen’s chaplain had blown four times on the body of the child, as it might be on the four branches of the Cross, to cast out the Devil from him by virtue of the Holy Ghost; then, spitting on his forefinger, he had smeared the child’s ears and nostrils with saliva to signify that he must not listen to the voice of the Devil, nor breathe the temptations of the world and the flesh.

  Philippe and Mahaut took up the little King, one by the legs and the other by the shoulders. The Regent, with his short-sighted eyes, gazed insistently at the child’s minute sex, that pink grub which frustrated all his brilliant plans for the succession, that derisory symbol of male succession, that tiny but insurmountable barrier between himself and the crown.

  ‘In any case,’ thought Philippe to console himself, ‘I shall be Regent for fifteen years. And in fifteeen years many things can happen; shall I be alive myself in fifteen years’ time? And will this child live till then?’

  But to be Regent is not to be King.

  The child remained perfectly quiet, even slept during the preliminary rites. He found his voice only when he was completely immersed in the cold water, but then he howled with the full force of his lungs, almost suffocating himself, and his tears mingled with the water of his baptism. While the other godfathers and godmothers, Gaucher, Jeanne, the Bouvilles and the Seneschal, held their hands over the little naked body, he was immersed three times, first with his head towards the east, then to the north, then to the south, to symbolize the sign of the Cross.27

  He grew quiet again when he had been taken from the icy bath, and placidly accepted the consecrated oil with which his forehead was anointed. He was placed on the cushions and Marie de Cressay proceeded to dry him, while the rest of those present crowded as close as they could to the warmth of the braziers.

  Suddenly Marie de Cressay’s voice rang out through the chapel.

  ‘Lord! Lord! He’s dying, he’s dying!’ she screamed.

  Everyone rushed to the table. The infant King had turned blue, and moment by moment his colour grew darker till it was almost black; his body was stiff, his arms contracted, his head twisted and his eyes had turned up, showing only the whites.

  An invisible hand was stifling his insentient life amid the wavering candles and the anxious, bended heads.

  Mahaut heard a voice murmur: ‘She did it.’

  She raised her eyes and encountered the gaze of the Bouvilles.

  ‘Who can have done the deed so as to accuse me of it?’ she wondered.

  However, the midwife had taken the child from Marie’s trembling hands and was trying to reanimate it.

  ‘It’s not certain he’ll die, it’s not certain,’ she said.

  The child stayed rigid, extended and dark in hue for nearly two minutes, which seemed to last an infinity of time; then, suddenly, he began jerking in violent spasms, his head bobbing in all directions, his limbs twisting; it seemed incredible that there could be so much force concealed in so puny a body. The midwife had to hold him tight to prevent him from falling out of her hands. The chaplain crossed himself as if he were in the presence of some manifestation of the Devil and began reciting the prayers for the dying. The child’s face was contorted and he was slobbering; the black tint disappeared from his skin and was gradually replaced by a sort of icy pallor which was no less alarming. He then became still, urinated over the midwife’s dress, and they thought he was saved; but his head immediately fell forward; he grew slack and inert; and now they believed he was really dead.

  ‘It was high time he was baptized,’ said the Constable.

  Philippe was picking the hot wax from the candles off his hands.

  And suddenly the little body waved its legs, uttered several cries, feeble but no longer distressful, and his lips worked in a movement of suction; the King was alive and hungry.

  ‘The Devil fought hard before being expelled from his body,’ said the chaplain.

  ‘It is not usual’, the midwife explained, ‘for convulsions to seize on a child so early. It’s because he was born with forceps; it does happen from time to time. And then he lacked the wet-nurse’s milk for several hours.’

  Marie de Cressay felt herself to blame, ‘If only I had come at once, instead of arguing with Madame de Bouville,’ she thought.

  No one, of course, thought of blaming the immersion in cold water, nor made allusion to the family’s splendid heredity, to the cripples, lunatics and epileptics flourishing on that glorious tree.

  The reasons given by the midwife, and in particular the pressure on the brain by the forceps, were in any case sufficient.

  ‘Do you think he’s likely to suffer further seizures?’ Mahaut asked.

  ‘It is much to be feared, Madame,’ replied the midwife. ‘One cannot tell when a fit will come on him, nor how it will end.’

  ‘Poor child!’ said Mahaut loudly.

  They took the King back to the Château and separated unhappily.

  Philippe of Poitiers said no word during the whole journey back. When he reached the Palace, he allowed his mother-in-law to follow him and shut herself into the room with him.

  ‘You only missed being King by very little just now, my son,’ she said.

  Philippe made no reply.

  ‘Indeed, after what we have seen, no one would be surprised if the child were to die during the next few days,’ she went on.

  The Regent remained silent.

  ‘Nevertheless, if he died, you would still be obliged to wait for Jeanne of Navarre’s majority.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mother! Oh no!’ Philippe replied vehemently. ‘We are no longer bound now by the law of July. The question ºof Louis’s succession is closed; it would be the question of little Jean’s succession which would have to be considered. Between my brother and myself there would have been a king, and I should be my nephew’s heir.’

  Mahaut gazed at him in admiration: ‘He has thought this out during the christening,’ she thought.

  ‘You have always dreamed of being king, Philippe; admit it,’ she said. ‘Even when you were a child you used to break off branches to make yourself sceptres!’

  He raised his head a little and smiled at her, letting the silence run on. Then, grave again, he said: ‘Do you know, Mother, that the Dame de Fériennes has disappeared from Arras,
as have the men I sent to arrest her and deal with her to prevent her talking too much? It appears that she is held secretly in some castle of Artois, and they say that your barons are boasting of it.’

  Mahaut wondered what Philippe intended by this warning. Did he merely wish to point out the dangers she ran? Or prove to her that he was protecting her? Or was it his manner of confirming his prohibition to resort to poison? Or, alternatively, was he, by making allusion to the supplier of the poison, giving her to understand that she had a free hand?

  ‘Further convulsions might well kill him,’ went on Mahaut.

  ‘Leave it to God, Mother, leave it to God,’ said Philippe, putting an end to the audience.

  ‘Leave it to God, or leave it to me?’ thought the Countess of Artois. ‘He’s prudent, even to the point of taking care not to damn his own soul; but he understood me very well. It’s that fat idiot Bouville who’ll give me most trouble.’

  From that moment her imagination set to work. Mahaut had a crime in prospect; and that the victim was a newborn child excited her as much as if he had been the most ferocious of protagonists.

  She began a careful campaign of perfidy. The King had been born unlikely to live; she told everyone so, and described, with tears in her eyes, the painful scene at the christening.

  ‘We all thought he was going to die before our eyes, and indeed he very nearly did so. Ask the Constable who was there too; I’ve never seen Messire Gaucher, who is a brave man, turn so pale. Besides, everyone will be able to judge of the little King’s weakness when he is presented to the barons, as must be done. It may even be that he is already dead, and that it is being concealed from us. For the presentation is unduly delayed, and no reason has been given us for it. It appears that Messire de Bouville is opposed to it because the unfortunate Queen – whom God keep! – is desperately ill. But after all the Queen is not the King!’

  Mahaut’s followers, such as her cousin Henry de Sully and her chancellor Thierry d’Hirson, spread her remarks.

  The barons were becoming alarmed. For indeed, why was the solemn presentation being so long deferred? The private christening, Bouville’s evasions, the impenetrable silence maintained at Vincennes: all seemed mysterious.

  Contradictory rumours were going the rounds. The King was a cripple and they did not wish to reveal it. The Count of Valois had had him removed and taken secretly to Naples to place him in safety. The Queen was not ill; she had returned to her own country.

  ‘If he’s dead, we should be told so,’ some were murmuring.

  ‘The Regent has had him killed!’ others asserted.

  ‘What nonsense you’re talking! The Regent’s not that kind of man; but he’s mistrustful of Valois.’

  ‘It’s not the Regent; it’s Mahaut. She’s preparing her blow, or has already carried it out. She will keep on saying that the King cannot live!’

  While this ill-wind was blowing through the Court again, and people’s nerves were overwrought with odious conjectures and infamous suspicions, with which everyone felt himself to be bespattered, the Regent remained impenetrably silent. He was absorbed in the administration of the kingdom, and if someone spoke to him of his nephew, he changed the subject to Flanders, Artois, or the collection of taxes.

  On the morning of the 19th of November, since irritation was growing, a number of barons and masters of Parliament came in a delegation to have an audience with Philippe and make strong representations, demands almost, that he should agree to the presentation of the King. Those who were expecting a refusal or an evasive answer had an angry glint already in their eyes.

  ‘But I desire it, Messeigneurs, I desire the presentation as much as you do,’ said the Regent. ‘But I am being opposed in the matter; it’s the Count de Bouville who refuses it.’

  Then, turning to Charles of Valois, who had returned forty-eight hours earlier from his county of Maine, where he had been organizing his finances, he said: ‘Is it you, Uncle, who, in the interests of your niece Clémence, are preventing Bouville from showing us the King?’

  The ex-Emperor of Constantinople, not understanding why this attack should have been made on him, turned purple in the face and cried: ‘But, for God’s sake, Nephew, what makes you think that? I have never desired or asked such a thing! I haven’t even seen Bouville, or received any message from him, for several weeks. And I have come home especially for the presentation. I particularly desire that it should be made and that we should act in accordance with the customs of our fathers, as we haven’t done for far too long.’

  ‘Then, Messeigneurs,’ said the Regent, ‘we are all of the same mind and are agreed. Gaucher! You were at my brother’s birth. I am right in thinking that it is the godmother whose duty it is to present the royal child to the barons, am I not?’

  ‘Yes, of course, the godmother,’ replied Valois, vexed that on a point of ceremonial someone other than himself should be consulted. ‘I have attended all the presentations, Philippe; yours, which was a small one, because you were the second son, as well as Louis’s and later Charles’s. And my children were presented also on account of my crowns. It is always the godmother.’

  ‘Very well,’ went on the Regent, ‘I shall inform the Countess Mahaut at once that she will shortly have to perform this office, and I shall give orders to Bouville to open Vincennes to us. We shall set out on horseback at midday.’

  For Mahaut this was the opportunity for which she had been waiting. She allowed no one but Béatrice to dress her, and had a coronet placed on her head; the murder of a king deserved that much.

  ‘How long do you think it will take for your powder to affect a child five days old?’

  ‘That I cannot tell, Madame,’ replied the lady-in-waiting. ‘On the deer in your woods the result was manifest after one night. King Louis, on the other hand, resisted it for nearly three days.’

  ‘I shall always have, as a resource,’ said Mahaut, ‘the wet-nurse I saw the other day, a handsome girl indeed, but who comes no one knows whence, and no one knows who placed her there. Doubtless, the Bouvilles …’

  ‘I understand, Madame,’ said Béatrice smiling. ‘If the death should not appear natural, the girl could be accused and you could have her quartered.’

  ‘My relic, my relic,’ said Mahaut anxiously, touching her breast. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve got it, that’s all right.’

  As she was leaving the room, Béatrice murmured: ‘Whatever you do, Madame, do not blow your nose.’

  3

  Bouville’s Trick

  ‘LIGHT ROARING FIRES!’ Bouville told the servants. ‘Let the hearths flame red hot so that the warmth spreads to the corridors.’

  He went from room to room, paralysing work in his efforts to hurry it on. He dashed out to the drawbridge to inspect the guard, ordered sand to be spread in the courtyards, then had it swept up because it turned to mud, and checked all the locks though none of them would be used. All this activity was merely to cheat his own anxiety. ‘She’s going to kill him, she’s going to kill him,’ he kept muttering to himself.

  He met his wife in one of the corridors.

  ‘The Queen?’ he asked.

  Queen Clémence had been given the last sacraments that very morning.

  The Queen, whose beauty had become legendary in two kingdoms, was ravaged and disfigured by illness. Her nose was pinched, her skin had turned yellow, marked with red blotches the size of a two-livre piece; she stank appallingly; her urine contained traces of blood; she breathed with greater and greater difficulty and groaned from the intolerable pains in her head and stomach. She was completely delirious.

  ‘It’s a quartan fever,’ said Madame de Bouville. ‘The midwife says that if she gets through the day she may live. Mahaut has offered to send Master de Pavilly, her personal physician.’28

  ‘Not at any price, not at any price,’ cried Bouville. ‘None of Mahaut’s people must be allowed to come in here.’

  The mother was dying, the child was in danger, and more than two hundred ba
rons were due to arrive with their escorts! What splendid confusion there would be in a little while, and what an easy opportunity for committing a crime!

  ‘The child must not remain in a room next to the Queen,’ Bouville went on. ‘I cannot put enough men-at-arms to watch over him, and it’s all too easy to slip behind the tapestries.’

  ‘This is a fine time to think of it; where do you wish to put him?’

  ‘In the King’s room, to which all the entrances can be guarded.’

  They looked at each other with the same thought; it was the room in which the Hutin had died.

  ‘Prepare the room and light the fire,’ Bouville insisted.

  ‘Very well, my dear, I will obey you. But if you put fifty equerries about him, you cannot prevent Mahaut carrying the King in her arms for the presentation.’

  ‘I shall be near her.’

  ‘But if she has resolved to do it, she’ll kill him under your very nose, my poor Hugues; and you’ll notice nothing. A child five days old cannot struggle much. She’ll take advantage of the crowd to plunge a needle into the weak part of his head, make him breathe poison or strangle him with a lace.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ cried Bouville. ‘I can’t go to the Regent and say: “We don’t wish your mother-in-law to carry the King because we fear she’ll kill him.”’

  ‘No, you certainly cannot! We can but pray to God,’ said Madame de Bouville as she went off.

  Bouville, much disturbed, entered the wet-nurse’s room.

  Marie de Cressay was feeding both children at once. Both equally hungry, they clutched at her breasts with their little soft nails, and sucked noisily. Marie had generously given the King her left breast which was supposed to be the richer.

  ‘What is the matter, Messire? You seem disturbed,’ she asked Bouville.

  He stood before her, leaning on his great sword, the black-and-white locks of his hair falling beside his cheeks, and his paunch extending the coat of mail, a sexagenarian archangel committed to the difficult protection of a child.