The Iron King

by Maurice Druon

  ‘Well, you’re bright and early, Nephew,’ she said, showing no surprise. ‘You come rushing in like the wind! What’s all the hurry about?’

  ‘Aunt, Aunt,’ cried Robert, ‘all is lost!’

  Without changing position, Mahaut calmly drank off a full tankard of ruby-coloured Artois wine. It came from her own lands and she preferred it to all others to start the day with.

  ‘What have you lost, Robert? Another lawsuit?’ she asked.

  ‘I swear to you, Aunt, that this is no moment for bickering. The disaster that has come upon our family is very far from being a joke.’

  ‘What disaster for one of us could possibly be a disaster for the other?’ said Mahaut with calm cynicism.

  ‘Aunt, the King holds us in the hollow of his hand.’

  Some slight anxiety showed in Mahaut’s expression. She was wondering what trap had been set for her, what this preamble could mean.

  With a gesture he knew well, she turned back her sleeves over her forearms. Then she banged the table with her hand and called, ‘Thierry!’

  ‘Aunt, I cannot possibly talk before anyone but you,’ cried Robert. ‘What I have learnt touches our honour.’

  ‘Nonsense! You can say anything before my Chancellor.’

  She was suspicious and wanted to have a witness.

  For a short moment they measured each other with their eyes, she all attention, he delighting in the comedy. ‘Call in everyone,’ he thought. ‘Call them all in, and let them all hear.’

  It was a singular sight to see these two taking each other’s measure, to watch these two people with so many natural characteristics in common, these two cattle of the same blood, resembling each other so much, hating each other so well, come face to face.

  The door opened, and Thierry d’Hirson came in. An ex-Canon of Arras Cathedral, Mahaut’s Chancellor for the administration of Artois, and perhaps something in love with the Countess, this chubby little man with his round face and white pointed nose gave a surprising impression of assurance and authority. He had curiously thin lips, and great cruelty showed in his eyes. He believed in cunning, intelligence and tenacity.

  He bowed to Robert of Artois.

  ‘A visit from you is rare, Monseigneur,’ he said.

  ‘It appears that my nephew has a grave disaster to inform me of,’ said Mahaut.

  ‘Alas!’ said Robert, sinking into a chair.

  He took his time; Mahaut began to betray some impatience.

  ‘We have had our differences, Aunt,’ he said.

  ‘More than that, nephew; horrible quarrels which have ended ill for you.’

  ‘True, true, and God is my witness that I have wished you all the ill in the world.’

  He was using his favourite wile, a sound basic frankness, the avowal of his ill-intentions, in order to dissimulate the weapon he held in his hand.

  ‘But I would never have wished you this,’ he went on. ‘For you know that I am a good knight, and stand firm upon everything that touches one’s honour.’

  ‘What on earth is all this about? Speak, for goodness’ sake!’ cried Mahaut.

  ‘Your daughters, my cousins are convicted of adultery, and have been arrested on the order of the King, and Marguerite with them.’

  Mahaut did not immediately react to the blow. She did not believe it.

  ‘Who told you this story?’

  ‘I know it of my own knowledge, Aunt, and the whole Court knows of it, too. This happened yesterday evening.’

  From then on he enjoyed himself, teasing the fat woman, putting her in agony, telling her only as much of the business at a time as he wanted to, scrap by scrap, recounting how all Maubuisson had been startled by the King’s anger.

  ‘Have they confessed?’ asked Thierry d’Hirson.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Robert replied. ‘But doubtless the young Aunays are at this moment confessing on their behalf at the hands of your friend Nogaret.’

  ‘I don’t like Nogaret,’ said Mahaut. ‘Even if they were innocent they’d come out of the affair blacker than pitch, if he’s involved.’

  ‘Aunt,’ Robert went on, ‘I have ridden the thirty miles from Pontoise to Paris through the night in order to warn you, for no one else had thought of doing so. Do you still think that it’s ill-will that brings me here?’

  Under the shock and uncertainty Mahaut looked at her giant of a nephew and thought, ‘Perhaps he sometimes is capable of a kindly gesture.’

  Then she said in a surly voice, ‘Do you want anything to eat?’

  By this question alone Robert knew that she was really hard hit.

  He seized a cold pheasant from the table, tore it apart with his hands and began eating it. Suddenly he noticed his Aunt change colour in the most curious way. First, the top of her throat, above her dress edged with ermine, became scarlet, then her neck, then the lower part of her face. The blood could be seen rising across her face, reaching her forehead and turning it crimson. The Countess Mahaut put her hand to her breast.

  ‘That’s done it,’ Robert thought. ‘It’s killing her. It will kill her.’

  But not at all. The Countess rose to her feet and there was a sudden clatter. With a wide gesture of her arm she had swept the pâté of hare, the tankard and the silver plates to the floor.

  ‘The sluts!’ she howled. ‘After all I’ve done for them, after the marriages I arranged for them – to be caught out like a couple of drabs. Well, let them lose all they possess! Let them be imprisoned, impaled, hanged!’

  The Canon remained motionless. He was accustomed to the Countess’s tempers.

  ‘Do you know that was just what I was thinking, Aunt,’ said Robert with his mouth full. ‘It really is no proper return for all the trouble you’ve taken.’

  ‘I must go to Pontoise at once,’ said Mahaut without hearing him. ‘I must see them and tell them what to say.’

  ‘I doubt if you will be allowed to see them, Aunt. They’re in solitary confinement, and no one can …’

  ‘Then I shall speak to the King. Beatrice! Beatrice!’ she called, clapping her hands.

  A hanging moved to one side and a splendid girl of some twenty years, dark, tall, her breasts round and firm, her waist well marked, her legs long, came in unhurriedly. As soon as he saw her, Robert of Artois felt attracted.

  ‘Beatrice, you’ve heard everything, haven’t you?’ Mahaut asked.

  ‘Yes, Madam,’ replied the girl. ‘I was outside the door, as always.’

  There was a curious slowness about her voice, as there was about her gestures, about her manner of moving and about her glance. She gave a peculiar impression of a sort of flowing indolence and of abnormal placidity; one would have said that even lightning entering the window would not have made her move more quickly or taken that calm half-smile from the corners of her lips. But there was irony shining in the eyes beneath the long black lashes. Undoubtedly she rejoiced in the disasters, crises, and tragedies of others.

  ‘This is Thierry’s niece,’ Mahaut told her nephew; ‘I have made her my first lady-in-waiting.’

  Beatrice d’Hirson looked Robert of Artois up and down with a sort of candid shamelessness. She was obviously curious to know this giant of whom she had heard nothing but evil.

  ‘Beatrice,’ Mahaut continued, ‘have my litter harnessed and six horses saddled. We are going to Pontoise.’

  Beatrice continued to look straight into Robert’s eyes, and one might have thought that she had not heard. There was something at once irritating and disquieting about the beautiful girl. She gave men, from the first moment of meeting, a sense of immediate complicity, as if she would offer no resistance to them. And at the same time one wondered whether she was utterly stupid, or, perhaps, on the other hand, was quietly laughing at people.

  ‘I shall have that girl,’ thought Robert, as she went slowly out of the room; ‘I don’t know when, but I shall.’

  There was but little left of the pheasant and he threw it into the fire. He was now thirsty. No
more wine had been brought. From a side-table Robert took the decanter from which Mahaut had helped herself – and thus ran no risk of being poisoned – and poured a great bumper down his throat.

  The Countess was walking to and fro, folding back her sleeves and biting her lips.

  ‘I shall not leave you alone from today, Aunt,’ said Artois. ‘I shall come with you. It’s a family duty.’

  Mahaut raised her eyes towards him, once more somewhat suspicious. Then at last she made up her mind to accept his advice.

  ‘You have done me much harm, Robert, and I dare swear that you will do me more. But, I must admit it, today you have behaved like a good fellow.’

  9

  The Blood Royal

  DAY WAS BEGINNING TO enter the long, low, cellar-like room in the old Castle of Pontoise in which Nogaret had interrogated the Aunay brothers. Through the narrow skylights, which had been opened for purposes of ventilation, came puffs of white mist. A cock crowed, then another, a flock of sparrows flew past at ground level. The torch upon the wall flickered, adding its acrid smell to that of the tortured bodies. It gave but little light, and Guillaume de Nogaret said in his curt, impersonal voice, ‘The torch.’

  One of the two executioners left the wall against which he was leaning and brought a new torch from a corner of the room; he lit it by placing one end against the embers which had heated the now useless irons. Then he placed it in the socket fixed to the wall.

  The man went back to his place, next to his companion. The two executioners – ‘tormentors,’ as they were called – had the same rough exterior, the same doltish faces, while their eyes were now red-circled with fatigue. Their strong hairy forearms, still showing traces of blood, hung down beside their leather jerkins. They smelt horribly.

  Nogaret barely looked at them; he got up from the stool upon which he had been sitting during the interrogation, and his thin figure cast an uncertain shadow upon the grey stone.

  From the farther end of the room came the sounds of gasping breath mingled with sobs; the two brothers Aunay seemed to groan with one voice. The executioners, their business over, had left them lying on the ground. But, without asking Nogaret’s permission, they had fetched Gautier’s and Philippe’s cloaks and had thrown them over their bodies as if to hide them from themselves.

  Nogaret bent forward; the two faces resembled each other strangely. The skin was the same grey, with traces of perspiration, and the hair, clotted with sweat and blood, revealed the shape of the skulls. A continuous trembling accompanied the groans issuing from torn lips upon which the marks of their teeth were visible.

  Gautier and Philippe d’Aunay had been children, and later young men, in happy circumstances. They had lived for their desires and their pleasures, their ambitions and their vanities. As were all boys of their rank, they had been trained to arms; but they had never suffered any but minor hardships or such as the imagination invents for itself. Only yesterday they had been part of the cavalcade of power, and every ambition seemed open to them. But one night had gone by and now they were nothing but broken animals; if they were still capable of wishing for anything, it was for death.

  Nogaret straightened up; his expression had not changed. The suffering of others, the blood of others, the insults of his enemies, despair and hate, flowed off him like water from a duck’s back. He had to make no great effort to manifest that legendary hardness, that insensibility, which had made him the faithful servant of the King’s most secret wishes. He was like he was because he had made himself thus. He had a vocation for what he considered to be the public weal, as others have a vocation for love.

  Vocation is a noble name for passion. In that heart of lead and iron, which was Nogaret’s, there existed the same egotism, the same fierce necessity which compels the lover to sacrifice everything for the body that obsesses him. Nogaret lived in a world in which everything was ordered by one rule: reasons of State. In his eyes individuals counted for nothing, not even himself.

  There is a singular strand running through history, always renewing itself, that of fanatics for the general good and for the written law. Logical to the point of inhumanity, pitiless towards others as towards themselves, these servants of abstract gods and of absolute law accept the role of executioners, because they wish to be the last executioner. They deceive themselves because, once dead, the world no longer obeys them.

  In torturing the brothers Aunay, Nogaret thought he was benefiting the life of the kingdom; he had looked upon the almost anonymous faces of Gautier and Philippe without it even occurring to him that they were the faces of men; conscience-free, he had cast his shadow across these haggard lineaments; for him they were no more than signs of disorder; he had conquered.

  ‘The Templars were tougher,’ was the only remark he made to himself. And what was more, he had only had local executioners available, not those of the Paris Inquisition.

  As he straightened up, he frowned, his back felt stiff and he was aware of a vague pain in his bones. ‘It’s the cold,’ he murmured. He had the skylights closed and went over to the brazier where the fire still glowed. He extended his hands, rubbing them together, then massaged the small of his back, muttering to himself.

  The two executioners, still leaning against the wall, seemed to be asleep. A moaning came from the ground where the brothers Aunay lay, but Nogaret no longer heard it.

  When he had sufficiently warmed himself, he came back to the table and picked up a parchment. Then, with a sigh, he went across to the door and went out.

  The executioners went over to Gautier and Philippe and tried to make them stand up. As they could not, they took in their arms the bodies they had tortured and carried them, as one carries sick children, to their cell.

  From the old Castle of Pontoise, which was used only as a garrison and a prison, it was about a mile or so to the royal residence of Maubuisson. Messire de Nogaret traversed the distance on foot, preceded by two of the Provost’s sergeants-at-arms and followed by a clerk carrying parchments and inkstand.

  Nogaret walked quickly, his cloak floating out behind his tall thin body. He enjoyed the cold morning breeze and the damp smell of the forest.

  Without replying to the salute of the archers of the guard, he crossed the courtyard of Maubuisson, entered the doorway, paying no attention to the whisperings, to the air of making vigil for the dead, which lay upon the chamberlains and gentlemen gathered in the hall and the corridors. An equerry leapt forward to open a door, and the Keeper of the Seals found himself face to face with the Royal Family.

  Philip the Fair was sitting at a long table covered with a silken cloth. His face appeared more drawn than usual. His unblinking eyes had blue shadows beneath them and his lips were a compressed line. Upon his right was Isabella, upright, rather hieratic, her crimped coif surmounted by a light diadem, the golden coils of her hair, framing her face like the handles of an amphora, accentuated the sternness of her expression. She was the author of the disaster. In other people’s eyes she shared the responsibility for it and, by that curious link which joins accuser to accused, she felt that she herself was also upon trial.

  On Philip the Fair’s left sat Monseigneur of Valois, nervously tapping the table with his fingers and wagging his head as if there was some irritating roughness in his collar. The King’s other brother, Monseigneur Louis d’Evreux, his manner calm, his dress quiet, was also present.

  The King’s three sons were there too, the three husbands of the Princesses; they were shattered and made ridiculous by the catastrophe; Louis of Navarre, with his squint and hollow chest, in continuous nervous movement; Philippe of Poitiers whose face, which always looked rather like a greyhound’s, was now still thinner and longer from the effort he was making to keep calm; and lastly Charles, whose adolescent good looks seemed ravaged by the first sorrow of his life.

  But Nogaret did not look at them; Nogaret wished to look at no one but the King.

  He unrolled his parchment and, upon a sign from the sovereign, r
ead the minutes of the interrogation. The tone of his voice was as calm as when he was putting Gautier and Philippe d’Aunay to the question. But in that cold room, lighted by three ogival windows, his voice echoed fearsomely; the Royal Family were now being put to the test. Since Nogaret liked his work to be precise, there was nothing lacking in his recital. Certainly the two Aunays, as gentlemen should, had begun by denying everything; but the Keeper of the Seals had a technique of interrogation before which scruples and honour soon failed. The month in which their liaison with the Princesses had begun, the days upon which the lovers met, the nights spent at the Tower of Nesle, the names of the servants who were privy to their proceedings, everything indeed which had represented passion, excitement and pleasure for those two, was here established and recorded in detail and become no more than slime. One might well wonder how many of those who knew what was taking place were laughing aloud.

  One hardly dared to look at the three Princes, and they themselves hesitated to look at each other. For more than three years they had been betrayed, mocked and deceived. Each word Nogaret uttered added to their shame.

  For Louis of Navarre there was a terrible suspicion implicit in the establishing of certain dates: ‘During the first six years of our marriage, we had no child. And then we had one precisely when Philippe d’Aunay began to sleep with Marguerite. So perhaps my little daughter Jeanne is not really mine.’ And he ceased listening to the recital because he was continuously repeating to himself, ‘My daughter is not mine … My daughter is not mine.’ He felt the blood rushing to his head.

  The Count of Poitiers, on the other hand, listened with attention to everything Nogaret said. For all his efforts, Nogaret had been unable to extract from the brothers Aunay any indication that the Countess Jeanne had had a lover, not even a name. Having admitted everything else, they would certainly have revealed this too had they known of it. There was no doubt that she had played a sufficiently infamous part. Philippe of Poitiers reflected thus.

  When Nogaret had finished, he placed the minutes on the table and Philip the Fair said, ‘Messire de Nogaret, you have presented these painful matters with clarity. When we have made our judgment, you will destroy this’ – he indicated the parchment – ‘so that no trace of it will remain except in the secrecy of our private ears. You have done well.’