The Cellars of Notre Dame

by Barbara Frale

  “There are still several hours before daylight!” Crescenzio kissed her with transport. “I have to see the Pope and show him this letter from your uncle,” he whispered. “It is clear now what the feared king of France wants from the Catalan!”

  V

  In the ancient heart of Rome there were areas into which decent men never ventured, so infested were they with brigands, cutthroats and criminals of every kind, and others still that possessed a reputation capable of instilling terror even in these aforementioned criminals.

  They were the islands of paganism where the light of Christ seemed never to have arrived, great vastnesses of uncultivated countryside dotted with tombs and mausoleums, funerary chapels with collapsed roofs and crumbling walls that exposed dark interiors which had been desecrated since time immemorial. Among those walls encrusted with marble vestiges and mosaics corroded by time, one sensed a dark and disturbing aura; the air itself seemed without peace, as if the ghosts of all those dead condemned to wander through the shadows of Hades were eager to return to the living to ask them for revenge or forgiveness.

  One of the most hidden and unapproachable places, a realm of owls and other wild beasts, was the strange crumbling building that stood on the tip of the Tiber Island. A sacred place since the dawn of time – but sacred to the pagan gods who knew neither mercy nor pity. It was said that the island was born by prodigy from the sheaves of wheat harvested from the fields of Tarquinius Superbus, which were thrown into the river during the expulsion of the kings; centuries later, when a terrible plague raged in Rome, some brave men had travelled to Greece to reach the temple of Epidaurus, and to take from it a divine serpent that upon arrival in the city had thrown itself into the water and made its nest in that strip of land in the middle of the river.

  The island was given the shape of a ship with a tall obelisk that resembled a mast placed in the geometric centre and a large prow in pale stone was built at its front end, where the serpent sacred to the god of medicine had nested; a little further down, hollowed out of the spur of rock that sloped down to the water’s edge, there were natural caves that were said to be inhabited by inhuman creatures.

  It was towards one of these rocky openings that Crescenzio was hurrying, dragging Maddalena behind him by the hand. Neither of them seemed particularly intimidated, though the soul of Dante, who was following a few steps behind, was in turmoil.

  “Hurry up, Dante,” said the youth, “we are almost there.”

  “Deo gratias!” Dante replied in a peevish voice. “I don’t understand your absurd insistence on going down to this witch’s cave. And dragging this innocent creature of your sister with you too! And I understand even less why I agreed to come with you…”

  “Oh come, Dante!” Crescenzio protested. “We are going to the gypsy to discover if my impression is right; and Maddalena is coming with us because the Saracen has a weakness for her – she seems to be convinced that the soul of her daughter who was abducted when she was a small child lives again in the body of my sister. And as for you – well, nobody forced you to come with us. You came of your own free will, my dear friend, and you did it because you are curious. That’s all.”

  “Curious…!” muttered Alighieri. “That horrible sorceress has been following me for days. Every time I turn a corner I find her there, as if she were waiting for me. As if she knew in advance where I was going.”

  “Ah, really?” said Crescenzio. “Then perhaps Zaira has something to tell you.”

  “And how could she? I doubt that she is in her right mind. One day she even gave me a strange painted rectangle and told me to give it to you, Crescenzio.”

  Maddalena turned her pretty little face to give Dante a severe look.

  “She gave you one of her , Dante? Which one?”

  Crescenzio was also amazed.

  “Did Zaira give you one of her cards? Why didn’t you tell us? “

  Alighieri couldn’t believe his ears.

  “By God’s wounds, because I didn’t think it mattered! And then I forgot about it.”

  “It might have been important,” said Crescenzio grimly. “Did you at least see it properly? What did it show?”

  Shocked by how seriously the two siblings were taking the matter, Dante lost his temper.

  “This is becoming ridiculous!” he snapped. “I find myself surrounded by individuals as convinced that they possess the absolute truth as if they were the Lord’s oracle. First this bishop of Pamiers, who is sure that Philip IV was born of a clandestine relationship. But how does he know, I say? Did he catch the queen about it? Or is there a companion, or maybe a servant who bore witness to it? Is there evidence of adultery? Who knows! And then there is Arnaldo da Villanova who knows the exact opposite: Philip IV is not a bastard child, and that too would be a certain fact. Mad ideas all, but none as mad as this decision to enter the den of a necromancer – a Saracen gypsy who possesses cards endowed with divinatory faculties!”

  Untroubled by that deluge of words, Crescenzio frowned.

  “Save us your tirade, Dante. Zaira’s cards do not predict the future, but help us to reflect upon things. I repeat: what was there on the one she gave you?”

  Exasperated and demoralized, Dante didn’t even bother to reply. Would it have helped matters? He began to rummage angrily in his bag until, to his surprise, he found the card. For some strange reason, he hadn’t thrown it away. An annoyed expression on his face, he handed it to the Caetani siblings.

  “The Lovers,” murmured Maddalena.

  “It alludes to the adultery of which Monsignor Saisset accuses the mother of Philip IV. Or perhaps to the relationship between King Philip III and Pier de la Brosse. It would have saved time if we had seen it before,” added Crescenzio. “But never mind! There are still many things which need to be clarified. Perhaps Zaira can help us.”

  “From bad to worse!” exclaimed Dante. “We are about to enter the den of a necromancer who practices divination, and who is so saturated with wickedness that she even believes in metempsychosis… Here we cross into full-blown heresy. If anyone sees us, all three of us risk ending up at the stake, even if you His Holiness’s nephews!”

  A slightly sinister smirk on his face, Crescenzio gave Dante a wink. He enjoyed seeing the face of Alighieri – a grown man and something of a pedant to boot – turn white with irrational fear. Why he hardly even like himself any longer…

  When they reached the entrance to the cave, Maddalena cupped her hands around her mouth and called out loudly. After a few moments, they saw that strange, skinny figure with her large, sunken eyes, staring as though spirited, emerging into the sunlight. She was not at all surprised to see them.

  “Zaira, my brother would like to talk to you. He needs your help.”

  The woman unfastened the rope of an old worn-out bag that she carried over her shoulder, pulled out a pack of cards and then crouched on the ground and began to shuffle them with a sure hand.

  “The king of France,” murmured Crescenzio. “My doubt concerns him.”

  The gypsy placed three cards face-down on the ground and turned the first one over. It depicted a strong-willed woman pulling open the jaws of a lion, and was turned upside down.

  “Strength,” said Maddalena. “But it’s upside down. The uncontrolled gossip severely weakens the king. Is that what it means, Zaira?”

  The gypsy nodded and from her lips some syllables emerged which were indecipherable to Dante but nevertheless suggested evocative poetic resonances.

  “Cani affamatu nun timi vastuni.”

  “What kind of language does she speak?” asked a shocked Alighieri.

  Maddalena gave him an indulgent smile. “Her own, Dante. She says, ‘a hungry dog does not fear the stick’. It means that when one is desperate, one is no longer afraid of anything. The sovereign risks losing everything because of those rumours, hence his disproportionate reaction.”

  “Of course,” said Crescenzio. “And this confirms my conjecture. Zaira, please tel
l me if there is a way to appease the king of France. If he no longer feels threatened, he may cease to be aggressive. But how can we help him?”

  The gypsy made a silent gesture of assent and her fingers, painted with arcane patterns, revealed the face of the second card, which depicted a pope seated upon the throne of his double glory, both sacred and temporal.

  “Pattu vinci leggi,” said Zaira, as she stared into Crescenzio’s eyes.

  “I understand,” he said. “Sometimes an agreement can be more powerful than the law. In short, are you telling me that my uncle the Pope should bring his high authority to bear to resolve this knotty affair?”

  There was something brigand-like about the gypsy’s smile, but she made it clear that the youth had understood.

  “Very well, Zaira. Thank you. I understood perfectly what I have to do. And what the Pope must do too. We had better be going,” said Crescenzio, as he opened the purse strings to offer her a heavy and shiny silver coin.

  “One moment!” Maddalena observed. “There were three cards – one is still face down.”

  “Yes, you are right,” replied her brother. “But I don’t know what to think. The first two have fully answered my question.”

  The gypsy pointed her sharp claw at Dante, sending a long shiver running down his spine.

  “Idda è pi vossia,” she said.

  “It’s for him?” asked Crescenzio. “What do you mean?”

  The woman turned the card over. It depicted a large wagon full of bags, but it too was turned upside down.

  “A wagon?” asked Dante. “Does that mean that I will have to travel?”

  Crescenzio looked in silence at his sister, unable to see what to her was as clear as day. That card bore a bitter prophecy: traveling without a homeland and aimlessly, a life-long wayfarer on the routes of exile. Maddalena was sure of it; but she prayed intensely that this time, at least, she was mistaken.

  VI

  With discretion, Crescenzio peered at the page where his friend had just written those rhyming verses of vulgar hendecasyllables.

  “More material for your poem, Ser Dante?”

  “Yes. The case of Pier de la Brosse and the conspiracy plotted against him by Marie of Brabant is precious stuff for me. A sad story of love and death, loyalty and betrayal. It’s a lot to think about, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is. Now, though, put your rhetoric in the service of something more urgent. We must draw up a report to present to the Pope. You shall dictate, I shall write; you are far better than me at composing texts.”

  “Well thank you very much!” Dante exclaimed, not a little piqued. “Of course, it must be said that the data I collected this morning is rather sketchy. The bare essentials, and perhaps not even that. I would have done much more if I could only have stayed in the library at least a whole day.”

  Crescenzio shot him a stunned look. The man was shameless!

  He had stayed in the penetralia of the Apostolic Library, hunched over the rare manuscripts that he had been longing to consult, for four hours in a row. He had leafed through a hundred codexes, rummaged everywhere, hurrying here and there among the shelves, even wanting to see the books written in Greek and in the Coptic language, of which he could not understand a damn thing; and then, as if all this were not enough, he had demanded to read even the ancient paleo-Christian tombstones walled up in the corridors of the gallery! Alighieri could without doubt be a long-winded, prolix type when he put his mind to it, but you had to admit his merits when it came to knowing how to reach his goal.

  “So, what did you find?”

  “Well,” began Dante, “we must start with the mother of Philip IV, Isabella of Aragon, who was the daughter of King James the Conqueror. Who in turn was the son of King Peter II of Aragon and of Marie of Montpellier, who was queen consort of Aragon and countess consort of Barcelona, who in turn was born of Count William VIII of Montpellier, who…”

  “Can we get to the point, Ser Dante? We will be here until nightfall otherwise!”

  The other, a little piqued, continued his speech undeterred.

  “Count William VIII of Monpellier, as I was saying, had married Eudokia Komnene, a Byzantine princess who was the daughter of Emperor Manuel Komnenos.”

  “Yes!” cried Crescenzio exultantly. “The prior of Paray lied to us – the king of France did not send him to Rome to prove that his family derives from Charlemagne. Even because he would have no hope of success.”

  “He certainly has no cause to complain about the prestige of his ancestors,” observed Dante, “mater certa, pater semper incertus: the maternal heritage cannot be refuted in any way. And on his mother’s side, Philip IV inherited the blood of the great Greek emperors. It is precisely this which the prior must document. I only wonder what the French king will do with such a certificate.”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?! According to his detractors, he is not entitled to the throne because he is not actually the son of Philip III. The proof that he comes from the glorious Komnenos provides him with an even more illustrious lineage than if he had actually been an heir to Charlemagne. After all, Pepin the Short was not much more than a butler who obtained the throne with a coup. I imagine that Philip IV will keep the work done by Paray hidden in a drawer for the moment.”

  “You consider it a weapon he will keep in reserve?” said Dante.

  “Certainly. He will use it only if necessary to cover his ars… ahem, to protect his from the atrocious pain of being called a bastard.”

  “Therefore, this is what Arnaldo da Villanova knows. The truth about the birth of the sovereign.”

  “I no longer have any doubts, Ser Dante. And even if I did, Egidio Colonna’s letter has swept them away.”

  “In the light of all this, the things that merchant from my city told me about the king’s bizarre manias also make sense,” said Dante. “Philip the Fair is obsessed with demonstrating his close affinity with St. Louis IX, even in his appearance.”

  “And there is also the fact that the Catalan has never been much interested in politics. The old man prefers to live in isolation like a hermit, and did so even when he was in Paris, so it seems unlikely to me that he attended important men. Is it possible that the conspirators let slip details of their plan in the hearing of a stranger?

  The sibylline words of Cardinal Lemoine, in particular the prophecy that the Capetian dynasty ended with Philip III, had nested a nagging doubt in Crescenzio’s head. If Philip III were the last legitimate king, that meant that his heirs were such no longer – something had entered the dynastic line and altered the succession: adultery.

  “I’ve also been thinking about what Prince Charles of Valois, a uterine brother of King Philip IV, told me,” said Crescenzio. “The Catalan had received a payment to give a at the Sorbonne. A medical lesson to students of theology? Madness. Valois, on the other hand, didn’t find it strange at all. His words hinted that Arnaldo’s lesson dealt with medical matters which were strictly connected with doctrine.”

  “I think the only medical question that involves the religious sphere concerns sodomy,” Dante observed. “In itself, it would only be a carnal sin and no more serious than any other, but it is commonly believed that coitus between males corrupts the virile seed, meaning that sodomites cannot procreate healthy children. Perhaps they can make a woman pregnant, but the unborn child does not live long.”

  “I was a fool not to see it!” cried Crescenzio.

  “I should have realised it too,” the other confirmed regretfully.

  “My stupidity is worse than yours, Ser Dante. Cardinal Lemoine told me plainly to investigate Marie of Brabant. More he could not say, in his position, but it was a good suggestion: as the widow of Philip III, obviously she must know of certain of her late husband’s habits!”

  Dante shook his head.

  “Now it is all clear. On the basis of something we do not know, Arnaldo da Villanova can prove that the legitimacy of King Philip IV is indisputable, despite the defa
mation of his father. The sovereign is not wrong when he accuses the old man of possessing a prodigious antidote: what he knows is capable of saving France from the spectre of civil war. I just wonder what kind of proof it can be that the old man has.”

  Crescenzio threw open his arms in submission.

  “I’m afraid we’ll never know, Ser Dante. The only one who can help us is the Catalan, and he is impenetrable. He didn’t even speak when he was in jail, where they undoubtedly subjected him to torture and the rack. In practice, there is not a single person on the face of the earth who is capable of getting that secret out of him, or of breaching his stoney old heart!”

  Or was there?

  In unison, Crescenzio and Dante turned their heads towards the window, from whence came the sweet voice of Maddalena, who, sitting on a bench in the Vatican gardens, was singing a love song.

  VII

  There is a mysterious power hidden in the sweet scent of the heliotrope flower. Herbalists know how to use it to make poultices to heal wounds, but according to the language of magicians, the plant gives clairvoyance and helps those who know how to use it to discern the truth.

  Sitting alone, her lute abandoned on the bench beside her and on her knees the book she had been trying to read, Maddalena stared wistfully at one of the shrubs growing there on the ground in front of her. She wondered if it was true, and how that little heliotrope plant could help her to see into her future.

  The haze of autumn had been followed by the mists of winter. Christmas would soon arrive, and with it the inevitable invitation of her maternal grandparents to spend the holidays with them in Soriano. She liked the great white stone castle perched on the Cimini Mountains. Grandfather Orso was no longer in his right mind, given his age, but grandmother Angela taught her to cook and let her sleep in her bed, and once they were holed up under the covers, would amuse her by telling her a lot of rude stories. That year, though, she was less enthusiastic than usual. From certain conversations she had overheard at home, half words and sentences left hanging by her brothers, she had the feeling that they were looking for a husband for her; which, in hindsight, was inevitable, for a girl of her class: the pope’s niece, who brought with her more than a thousand gold florins as a dowry.