The Cellars of Notre Dame
Page 3
In her heart, Joan warmly hoped that her prolonged nocturnal solitude truly have something to do with the Catalan; when that old man had departed so suddenly from Paris he had left several matters unresolved and the king, however hard he tried to hide it, in a state of anxiety. And what was worse, the old man had taken advantage the absence of the sovereign going north for certain war negotiations to steal away. When he returned to the capital, the king had learned that Arnaldo had already been gone for over ten days – long enough to comfortably have reached Marseilles and from there set sail for who knew where: there was no hope of recapturing him. It was later discovered that he had sailed with the wind at his back for the Italian coasts, and from there to Rome, where Boniface awaited him with open arms.
Philip IV saw that clandestine departure as the betrayal of a friend, if not actually a father, and he could not resign himself to the gnawing resentment he felt.
For weeks Joan had told herself that it must be that, and she had blamed all of her own unhappiness on the experiments of the old man who seemed to be so important for her husband; but now she was no longer sure. In reality, the wagging tongues of the court gave a name and a face to her atrocious suspicions, and it certainly was not one as wrinkled by advanced age and darkened by meditations in the desert as that of Arnaldo. Quite the contrary: the cause of her anxieties had rosy skin and fatally stupendous eyes. Had it been anyone else, she wouldn’t have worried too much: men tire of their conquests all too soon, and one lover is replaced by another. But he was no common man. Unbending as he was, it was hard for him to feel loves, but his friendship, as well as his grudges and obsessions, lasted forever.
In her heart, Joan was as afraid to know who her rival was as she was of death itself. Her very heart twitched at the thought of her and her proud beauty, worthy of a goddess of the Nordic sagas: Matilda, countess of Artois, known as the Panther of Artois for the powerful allure of her green eyes and the pridefulness of her character. The king’s cousin, she was entirely devoted to him in body and in soul, and because she too was French, so she could support him in every way and always be at his side, while Joan had the responsibility for governing her own kingdom.
It was God himself who had put this burden on her shoulders when he had decided that she was queen of Navarre. By marrying Philip IV, she had also become sovereign consort of France, but this new role of companion of the most feared monarch in the Christian world had not made her forget her sacred duties. Thus her married life had turned into a long battle in which her most cherished affections, and even her passions, clashed continuously and ruthlessly with the cynical logics upon which the workings of the world functioned. Theirs was no marriage, but an endless game of chess that often saw them as opponents.
As a wife she was subject to him, but only in the narrow confines of the narrow private sphere; he commanded in bed, and Joan burned with desire to obey his requests when she had the privilege of being at his mercy. Outside of their intimacy, though, she was and would always remain above all a monarch – a person bound to act in the interest of that people who had been entrusted to her by the divine will. Every time Philip IV tried to induce her to betray that sacred mandate, war broke out between them: Joan could not, must not, did not want to do it.
For years she had heroically endured the immense effort of performing this double role: of being a faithful companion but also, when necessary, an enemy. Now, however, the attachment the king was showing towards his cousin risked changing everything between them.
While her maids knocked insistently, Queen Joan sighed. She was already dressed. On her knees, her eyes half-closed, as if she had been deep in prayer the whole night.
Thus must the bride of the Bishop of Christ be.
The world expected it from her. And she would not fail in her duty.
*
Dawn was breaking.
As stealthy as a thief, Philip of Fontainebleau ran, close to the wall, along the long walkway carved into the bulk of the Louvre towers. He had to hurry, or the growing light of the day would betray him. He got to the end and opened the bolt of the door, which was so low that only a child could have gone through it standing. He crouched down and went through, and was immediately welcomed by the pleasant smell of balsamic essences that always hovered in the room. His Majesty’s bathroom, completely tiled with lapis lazuli-blue Andalusian majolica tiles.
He turned and closed the door carefully, making the huge and sumptuous wooden commode which was attached to it rotate on its hinges. The high back, cuspidate and decorated with fretwork like the spires of a cathedral, gave the object the majestic appearance of a papal seat. Now was a throne, by God!
Silence everywhere. There was no king at the Louvre. The chamberlain had announced that the king was at Maubuisson, with the five hundred odd servants of the court he was obliged always to take with him in any circumstance, because it was what his very special dignity demanded.
Generally, even the bathroom was crowded. Behind the screen, there would be ten dignitaries who had schemed, betrayed and cut throats in order to have the coveted privilege of guarding the sovereign while he emptied his bowels. And so they stood there and spoke to him about politics and finance, happy to be able to share even those intimate moments with His Majesty.
“Philip IV might be the master of the world”, thought the knight of Fontainebleau, “but he is not the master of emptying how bowels without his devoted sycophants immediately launching into flattering comments about the musicality of the noise and the pleasantness of the aroma, the sons of bitches!”
He walked slowly so as not to make any noise and opened the door to the adjacent room, the sovereign’s immense bedroom. It was beautiful in the harmony of morning chiaroscuro. The calm, cold colours of the light gave it an aura of purity that made it look like a sanctuary, quiet, silent and empty. It was impossible to imagine the machinations, insults and crimes it was witness to over the course of a day.
Among its curtains of blue quilted silk, he saw the royal bed, large enough for an orgy with seven concubines at once. And they said that the king slept alone! Next to the bed, there was the precious gala robe that His Majesty wore on formal occasions, when he needed to shine in all his glory. It was dyed Tyre purple, and the cloak was entirely lined with ermine, blue as the vault of the sky at noon and studded with the glow of the golden lilies of King Clovis, the founder of the monarchy. It was mounted on a tall wooden mannequin which, in the crepuscular pre-dawn light, looked like a real person.
Philip of Fontainebleau’s lips stretched tight. Suddenly, he felt all the resentment and the fatigue that he had been harbouring for a lifetime. A feeling that made him want to pull out his dagger and stab it into the back of that dummy with all the strength he possessed, if only it had been a being of flesh and blood!
The king of France was his worst enemy – and, unfortunately, he could never be separated from him. Though it was painful, it had to be admitted that the king was a necessary evil. They needed a lunatic like Philip IV, for the good of France and of the whole world. To protect the working people by humiliating the arrogant nobles, those vile, idle parasites who thought only of mounting conspiracies and slaughtering one another, and to moderate the habits of the clergy – that vicious, corrupt and power-seeking clergy who were busy doing everything except serving God.
Including the Roman Supreme Pontiff Boniface VIII, who for some time now had been demonstrating that he was no saint.
The job of kings is never easy and it is not for everyone, because one must be able to do what good people would never do, and afterwards, have the courage to take the secrets capable of destroying peoples and states with you to the grave. A king does not govern with impunity; he knew that, and was reasonably happy with his lot in life. But sometimes, some nights, he was assailed by melancholy, and then, following the teachings of his tutor, he disappeared into the darkness and pretended to have another life, losing himself in the mass of plebs with no name and no identity.
A man like Philip IV – a man with a severe nature, completely invested in the sacred role that God had entrusted to him – could certainly not approve of such excesses; as a private citizen who had few or no duties, though, Fontainebleau was free to enjoy the friendship of Castilian by participating from time to time in his pranks which terrorized the city.
“God preserve you,” said Alphonse. “Did you have good hunting tonight?”
Philip of Fontainebleau seemed in no mood for jokes. “Not yet. But my prey will soon fall into my hands.”
Thinking Fontainebleau’s words referred to some beautiful lover, Castilian gave him a mischievous wink. He was immediately disillusioned: Fontainebleau’s grim face was unsuited to the happy congresses of love.
“I have to get Arnaldo da Villanova back to Paris. One way or another,” Fontainebleau said, and there was in his voice a nuance of threat.
“Arnaldo the Catalan?”
“Yes, damn it!” growled Fontainebleau through gritted teeth. “I’ve had no peace since he left. And now I must remedy the problem.”
“It regards those studies that the old man was conducting on your behalf, I imagine. What were they?”
Philip of Fontainebleau turned eyes of the deepest blue on the Castilian.
“An infallible antidote,” he murmured, distractedly.
His apocalyptic tone disquieted Castilian.
“An antidote? Is there some danger of an epidemic?”
Alphonse’s thoughts immediately went to the south of France, where people were in uproar about plague spreaders – sinful heretics who hid in the woods and under cover of darkness came to the towns and cities where they sprinkled the walls of houses with toxic ointments capable of contaminating men and beasts while others poisoned the water in the wells. In the town of Metz, the police force was obliged to fine anyone found giving alms to lepers, because this encouraged them to leave their enclosures and roam the inhabited areas. Non-compliant officials were hung upside down above a cloaca and immersed in the filthy sewage until they swore to comply with the law. They said that Edward I, the king of England, had found an infallible method to stem the contagion: in his kingdom, whoever contracted leprosy was immediately buried alive.
With a shudder, Alphonse of Castile made the sign of the cross.
“I realize that it is important to get the old man back, but how will you manage it? I doubt very much that Arnaldo will agree to set foot in France again after what happened. He hates the king, as you know very well.”
Fontainebleau shook his head.
“The Catalan hates the king of France, it’s true,” he repeated. “But it so happens that he loves his apprentice. He gave him a part of his soul, but has not yet finished instructing him. And this undoubtedly causes him anger and frustration. A feeling of incompleteness against which he will want to react.”
While he spoke those words, which had about them the ring of a decree, the knight of Fontainebleau slowly put his ring back onto the finger of his right hand. Mounted in it was an extremely rare two-tone diamond of incalculable value. It was unique on the face of the earth, though there were some who said that the arcane stone had actually come from the heavens.
In silence, Alphonse de la Cerda watched that familiar gesture. How many times he had seen it done! And yet it always took his breath away. He immediately removed the cheerful, comradely smile from his face and his expression became serious and full of veneration. The time for joking and for familiarity was over; he had before him a sacred being now.
Slowly, the Castilian bowed.
III
The snow seemed to hang suspended over the roofs of Paris. On that bitter November morning, the sky was of an ambiguous colour, pervaded as if by an opaque and suffused lactescence. It was reminiscent of the horizon of the far north, where it was said that wolves went blind due to the overabundance of light reflecting off the ice. The air seemed to stand still, motionless even under the melodic vibrations of the bells of Notre-Dame, which rang out in celebration of the Sunday liturgy.
In the main hall of the Louvre there were three hundred people: nobles and Parisian magnates, the heads of the Corporations and several members of the high clergy. Yet in that crowd of people crammed so tightly that it was hard work even to breathe, the buzzing of a fly would have been distinctly heard. The servants too came and went in silence, as cautious as ghosts. Up and down the stairs hurried murmuring shadows and the whispers of waiting dignitaries.
Mounted on a high stage entirely covered with blue drapes with gold lilies next to the throne of the king of France was the throne of Joan, queen of Navarre. Its equal in height and splendour, it was set apart from it by the vivid red of its emblem: red, the colour of blood, of ardent faith, and of strenuously fought battles.
Crowns on their heads and sceptres in their right hands, the two monarchs sat side by side, both as rigid and immobile as statues on the portal of a church. Life had united them and the sacrament of marriage had made them one body, one flesh; yet those who looked at them at that moment might be inspired to think of two stars that each followed their own course across the heavens, close but eternally divided.
To the right of the royal throne stood Pierre Flotte, chancellor of the kingdom, and to the left of the queen there was Monsignor Simon Matifort, bishop of Paris; they looked like bishops lined up on a chessboard.
The knight Jean de Picquigny bowed before the king’s throne and spoke. He had chosen to dress in an inauspicious colour that day: a dark and macabre violet that evoked curdled blood. All around hung a cold and sacred silence.
“Majesty, I have sworn allegiance to you and to France to the death,” said Picquigny, “therefore I would not be a good servant of my country if I hid from you the gravity of what is happening in the south. Things are exactly as the Chancellor feared, sire; or even worse. Bernard Saisset, the bishop of the diocese of Pamiers, convenes the great feudal lords of the south in secret meetings, and instigates them to organize a revolt. The bishop challenges feudal right, Majesty; he reminds them of the massacres carried out by the soldiers of King Philip Augustus one hundred years ago, when they went to fight the heretics of Albi. He claims that the war was an act of usurpation, that the sacred Crown of France used the pretext of the crusade to destroy, plunder and dispossess the nobles of the South, whose estates were taken away to be delivered into the hands of men loyal to the king. Many great lords are with him, sire. The barons of Languedoc claim their independence. They are ready to do battle.”
At a nod from the Chancellor, Picquigny listed the twenty-three charges he had collected during the investigation conducted by order of the king. The bishop of Pamiers did not cease to proclaim that the sovereign, by contesting the sacred authority of the pope – the holy authority of Saint Peter – was dangerously inviting the scourge of divine wrath upon the kingdom. God would punish him, and along with him all his French subjects. In his vehement speeches to the people he used apocalyptic tones, speaking of the fire and sulphur that the Lord would throw down upon France, just as he had upon Sodom and Gomorrah. He spoke of the seven plagues of Egypt and the appalling decimation of the Egyptian people that the hardness of the Pharaoh’s heart had caused: with which, all understood, he was referring
to Philip IV. By doing so, Saisset was using defamation to sow a gnawing resentment in the hearts of the people, emphasizing what the people loved least about their sovereign. He catalysed their collective fears, starting with the most serious: the plague.
He used evocative turns of phrase which had a powerful impact on the ignorant and those who were easy to manipulate, and now they were spreading from mouth to mouth throughout the kingdom, as well-known as nursery rhymes. Or worse, as reliable as proverbs.
He’s neither man nor beast; he’s a statue.
Our sovereign is like the eagle owl, the most majestic of the birds – and the most worthless. All he can do is sit there staring blankly without saying a word.
To see him at that moment, magnificent and motionless on the throne like some inanimate being, his icy gaze immobile on the crowd, yet absent as if the whole affair did not concern him at all, Philip IV seemed to confirm to the letter the impertinences of his enemy. He was a man who kept silent and made his appointees act, perpetually entrenched behind the thoughts, words and deeds of others, enclosed in his own often impenetrable mystery even for those who were beside him.
Although she too sat straight-backed and haughty, the gaze of Queen Joan could not have been more different, her intense inner conflicts betrayed by the movements of her eyes. Every once in a while her face lost the majestic immobility that had been taught to her from the cradle and for a moment she became sad – she seemed to be advancing into an unreal space and time, full of dangers only she seemed to sense.
“Sire,” said Picquigny, “you know that the whole of the south is riven by rioting. People are exhausted by the great plague that struck the region during the summer. They are exasperated, and in such cases even a vulgar charlatan can trigger a revolt. Monsignor Saisset declares that you are to blame for that pestilence because your pride against the Pope offends God, and he adds that the greatest evil is yet to come: a tremendous evil that will remain inscribed in the annals of France. I could not induce him to explain what he meant by this obscure prophecy, but he seems very sure of himself. And the people take heed of his words.”