The Strangled Queen

by Maurice Druon

  ‘I shall remember to do so, my good fellow, I shall remember,’ replied Artois, who already knew that he would do nothing about it whatever.

  When Robert entered Marguerite’s room, the two Princesses had not quite finished dressing; they had washed lengthily before the fire with the warm water and the soapwort which had been brought them, making the restored pleasure last as long as possible; they had washed each other’s short hair, now still pearly with drops of water, and had newly clothed themselves in long white shirts, closed at the neck by a running string, which had been provided. For a moment they were afflicted with modesty.

  ‘Well, Cousins,’ said Robert, ‘you have no need to worry. Stay as you are. I am a member of the family; besides, those shirts you are wearing are more completely concealing than the dresses you used once to appear in. You look like a couple of little nuns. But you already look better than a while ago, and your complexions are beginning to revive. Admit that your living conditions have quickly altered with my coming.’

  ‘Oh, yes indeed and thank you, Cousin!’ cried Blanche.

  The room was quite changed in appearance. A curtained bed had been brought, as well as two big chests which acted as benches, a chair with a back to it, and a trestle table upon which were already placed bowls, goblets and Bersumée’s wine. A tapestry with a faded design had been hung over the dampest part of the curved wall. A thick taper, brought from the sacristy, was alight upon the table, for though the afternoon had barely begun, daylight was already waning; and upon the hearth under the cone-shaped overmantel huge logs were burning, the damp escaping from their ends with a singing noise of bursting bubbles.

  Immediately behind Robert, Sergeant Lalaine entered with Private Gros-Guillaume and another soldier, bringing up a thick, smoking soup, a large white loaf, round as a pie, a five-pound pasty in a golden crust, a roast hare, a stuffed goose and some juicy pears of a late species, which Bersumée, upon threatening to sack the town, had been able to extract from a greengrocer of Andelys.

  ‘What,’ cried Artois, ‘is that all you’re giving us, when I asked for a decent dinner?’

  ‘It’s a wonder, Monseigneur, that we have been able to find as much as we have in this time of famine,’ replied Lalaine.

  ‘It’s a time of famine, perhaps, for the poor, who are idle enough to expect the earth to produce without being tilled, but not for the wealthy,’ replied Artois. ‘I have never sat down to so poor a dinner since I was weaned!’

  The prisoners gazed like young famished animals upon the food which Artois, the better to make the two women aware of their lamentable condition, affected to despise. There were tears in Blanche’s eyes. And the three soldiers gazed at the table with a wondering covetousness.

  Gros-Guillaume, who subsisted entirely on boiled rye, and normally served the Captain’s dinner, went hesitatingly to the table to cut the bread.

  ‘No, don’t touch it with your filthy hands,’ shouted Artois. ‘We’ll cut it ourselves. Go on, get out, before I lose my temper!’

  He could have sent for Lormet, but his guard’s slumber was one of the few things Robert respected. Or he could have sent for one of the horsemen, but he preferred to proceed without witnesses.

  As soon as the archers had gone, he said in that facetious tone of voice still assumed by the rich today when by chance they have to carry a dish or wash a plate, ‘I shall get accustomed to prison life myself. Who knows,’ he added, ‘perhaps one day, my dear Cousin, you will be putting me in prison?’

  He made Marguerite sit on the chair with the back.

  ‘Blanche and I will sit on this bench,’ he said.

  He poured out the wine, raised his goblet towards Marguerite, and cried, ‘Long live the Queen!’

  ‘Don’t mock me, Cousin,’ said Marguerite. ‘It is lacking in charity.’

  ‘I am not mocking you; you can take my words literally. As far as I know, you are still Queen this day, and I wish you a long life, that’s all.’

  Silence fell upon them, for they set about eating. Anyone but Robert might have been moved by the sight of the two women attacking their food like paupers.

  At first they had tried to feign a dignified detachment, but hunger carried them away and they hardly gave themselves time to breathe between mouthfuls.

  Artois spiked the hare upon his dagger and held it to the embers of the hearth to warm it. While doing so, he continued to watch his cousins, and had difficulty in controlling his laughter. ‘I’ve a good mind to put their bowls on the ground and let them get down on all fours and lick the very grain of the wood clean,’ he thought.

  They drank too. They drank Bersumée’s wine as if they needed to compensate all at once for seven months of cistern-water, and the colour came back to their cheeks. ‘They’ll make themselves sick,’ thought Artois, ‘and they’ll finish this happy day spewing up their guts.’

  He himself ate like a whole company of soldiers. His prodigious appetite was far from being a myth, and each mouthful would have needed dividing into four to suit an ordinary gullet. He devoured the stuffed goose as if it were a thrush, champing the bones. He modestly excused himself for not doing as much for the hare’s carcass.

  ‘Hare’s bones,’ he explained, ‘break into splinters and tear the stomach.’

  When they had all eaten enough, he caught Blanche’s eye and indicated the door. She rose without being asked, though her legs were trembling under her; she felt giddy and badly wanted to go to bed. Then Robert had the first humanitarian impulse since his arrival. ‘If she goes out into the cold in this state, she’ll die of it,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Have they lighted a fire in your room?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Cousin,’ replied Blanche. ‘Our life …’

  She was interrupted by a hiccough.

  ‘… our life is really quite altered thanks to you. Oh, how fond I am of you, Cousin, really fond indeed. You’ll tell Charles, won’t you? You will tell him that I love him. Ask him to forgive me because I love him.’

  At the moment she loved everyone. She went out, quite drunk, and tripped upon the staircase. ‘If I were here merely for my own amusement,’ thought Artois, ‘I should meet with little resistance from that one. Give a princess enough wine, and you’ll soon see that she turns into a whore. But the other one seems to me pretty tight too.’

  He threw a big log on the fire, turned Marguerite’s chair towards the hearth, and filled the goblets.

  ‘Well, Cousin,’ he asked, ‘have you thought things over?’

  ‘I have thought, Robert, I have thought. And I think I am going to refuse.’

  She said this very softly. Apparently overcome as much by the warmth as by the wine, she was gently shaking her head.

  ‘Cousin, you’re not being sensible, you know!’ cried Robert.

  ‘But indeed, indeed, I think I shall refuse,’ she replied in an ironic, sing-song voice.

  The giant made a gesture of impatience. ‘Listen to me, Marguerite,’ he went on. ‘It must be to your advantage to accept now. Louis is by nature an impatient man, ready to grant almost anything to get his own way at the moment. You will never again have the chance of doing so well for yourself. Merely agree to make the declaration asked of you. There is no need for the matter to go before the Holy See; we can get a judgement from the episcopal tribunal of Paris, which is under the jurisdiction of Monseigneur Jean de Marigny, Archbishop of Sens, who will be told to make haste. In three months’ time you will have regained complete personal freedom.’

  ‘And if I won’t?’

  She was leaning towards the fire, her hands extended before her. The running string which held together the collar of her long shirt had become unknotted and revealed most of her bosom to her cousin’s wandering eye; but she did not seem to care. ‘The bitch still has beautiful breasts,’ thought Artois.

  ‘And if I won’t?’ she repeated.

  ‘If you won’t, your marriage will be annulled anyway, my dear, because reasons can alw
ays be found for annulling a king’s marriage,’ replied Artois carelessly, intent upon the objects of his contemplation. ‘As soon as there is a Pope …’

  ‘Oh, is there still no Pope?’ cried Marguerite.

  Artois bit his lips. He had made a mistake. He ought to have remembered that she was ignorant, prisoner as she was, of what all the world knew, that since the death of Clement V the conclave had not succeeded in electing a new Pope. He had revealed a useful weapon to his adversary. And he realized by the quickness of Marguerite’s reaction to the news that she was not as drunk as she pretended to be.

  Having committed the blunder, he tried to turn it to his own advantage by playing that game of false frankness of which he was a master.

  ‘But that is exactly where your good fortune lies!’ he cried. ‘That is precisely what I want you to understand. As soon as those rascally cardinals, who sell their promises as if they were at auction, have made enough out of their votes to consent to agree, Louis will no longer have need of you. You will merely have succeeded in making him hate you all the more, and he’ll keep you shut up here for ever.’

  ‘Yes, but so long as there is no Pope, nothing can be done without my agreement.’

  ‘You’re foolish to be so obstinate.’

  He went and sat next to her, placed his huge hand as gently as he could about her neck and began to stroke her shoulder.

  Marguerite seemed troubled by the contact of his huge muscular hand. It was so long since she had felt a man’s hand upon her skin!

  ‘Why should you be so interested in my accepting?’ she asked.

  He bent low enough over her to brush her hair with his lips.

  ‘I am very fond of you, Marguerite; I always have been very fond of you, as you know very well. And now our interests are bound up together. You must succeed in regaining your freedom. And I must give Louis cause for satisfaction, so that I may enjoy his favour. You can see very well that we must be allies.’

  While speaking he had put his hand deep into the collar of the Queen of France’s shirt and was stroking her bosom. She made no resistance. On the contrary, she leant her head against her cousin’s heavy wrist and seemed to abandon herself to him.

  ‘Is it not a pity,’ went on Robert, ‘that so beautiful a body, so soft and comely, should be deprived of the pleasures of the flesh? Accept, Marguerite, and I will take you far from this prison this very day; I shall lead you first to some well-endowed convent where I can visit you frequently and watch over you. What can it really matter to you to declare that your daughter is not Louis’s, since you have never loved the child?’

  She raised wary eyes to him and said these appalling words: ‘If I don’t love her, is not that certain proof that she is my husband’s daughter?’

  For a moment she seemed to be dreaming, her eyes gazing upwards. The logs shifted on the hearth, lighting up the room with a great fountain of sparks. And Marguerite suddenly began to laugh, revealing her little white teeth; her mouth was all pink inside like a cat’s.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Robert.

  ‘Because of the ceiling,’ she replied, ‘I have just noticed that it is like the ceiling of the Tower of Nesle.’

  Artois rose in stupefaction. He couldn’t help feeling a certain admiration for so much cynicism joined to so much cunning. ‘My God, what a woman!’ he thought.

  She watched him as he stood enormous in front of the fire, planted on his legs solid as trunks of trees. The flames shone on his red boots, glinted on the gold of his spurs and the silver of his belt. If his capacity for desire were in proportion to the rest of him, there would be enough to atone for all the regrets of seven months’ seclusion!

  He raised her up and pulled her to him.

  ‘Ah, Cousin,’ he said, ‘if only you had married me, or had chosen me as your lover instead of that young fool of an equerry, things would not have turned out for you as they have, and we would have been very happy.’

  ‘Of course,’ she murmured.

  He held her by the waist, and he had the impression that the moment was near when she would cease to be able to think.

  ‘It is not too late, Marguerite,’ he said softly.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ she replied in a hoarse, consenting voice.

  ‘Let’s get rid of this letter now, so that we need have no concern but ourselves. Let’s tell the Chaplain, who is waiting below, to come up.’

  She started away from him.

  ‘Waiting below, did you say?’ she cried, her eyes bright with anger. ‘Oh, Cousin, do you think I am such a fool as all that? You have behaved towards me as whores normally do towards men, arousing their sensuality the better to bend them to their will. But you forget that in that line women are better than men, and you are no more than an apprentice.’

  Angry, tensely upright, she defied him and re-knotted the collar of her shirt.

  He tried to persuade her that she had misunderstood him, that he wanted nothing but her good, that their conversation had taken an unexpected turn, that he had suddenly remembered the poor priest freezing at the bottom of the staircase.

  She looked at him with scorn and irony. He picked her up, though she did her best to defend herself, and carried her roughly to the bed.

  ‘No, I shall not sign,’ she cried, fighting against him. ‘You can rape me if you like, because you are too strong for me to be able to resist you, but I shall tell the Chaplain, I shall tell Bersumée, I shall let Marigny know what sort of ambassador you are and how you have taken advantage of me.’

  Furiously angry, he let her go, restraining himself from slapping her face as he felt inclined to do.

  ‘Never, do you see,’ she went on, ‘will you get me to admit that my daughter is not Louis’s, for should Louis die, which I hope he does with all my heart, my daughter would become Queen of France and then people would have to take some account of me as Queen Mother.’

  For a moment Artois remained silent in astonishment. ‘What she says makes sense, the clever bitch,’ he said to himself, ‘and if by chance fate should prove her right …’ He was checkmated.

  ‘It’s an unlikely chance,’ he replied all the same.

  ‘I have no other, so I shall hang on to it.’

  ‘As you will, Cousin,’ he said, going to the door.

  His double failure made him extremely angry. He went down the stairs, found the Chaplain waiting for him, chilled to the bone, a bunch of goose-quills in his hand.

  ‘Monseigneur,’ said the Priest, ‘you won’t forget to say to Brother Renaud …’

  ‘Yes,’ shouted Artois, ‘I’ll tell him that you’re an ass, my fine fellow; I don’t know where the hell you manage to find weaknesses in your penitents!’

  Then he called, ‘Escort! To horse!’

  Bersumée arrived, still wearing the helmet which had not left his head since morning.

  ‘What are my orders, Monseigneur?’ he asked.

  ‘What, your orders? Obey those you already have.’

  ‘And my furniture?’

  ‘I don’t care a damn about your furniture.’

  Artois’s great Norman horse was already being led out to him, and Lormet held the stirrup ready.

  ‘And who will pay for the food, Monseigneur?’ asked Bersumée.

  ‘You will get it from Messire de Marigny! Go and lower the drawbridge!’

  Artois hoisted himself athletically into the saddle and set off at a mad gallop, followed by his whole escort.

  Soon in the falling darkness nothing was to be seen upon the slopes of Château-Gaillard but the sparks struck by the horses’ shoes.

  4

  Long Live the King!

  THE FLAMES OF THOUSANDS of tapers, arranged in clusters against the pillars, threw their wavering light upon the effigies of the Kings of France; ever and again the long stone faces seemed to assume the mobile expressiveness of a dream world, and one might have thought that an army of knights was sleeping an enchanted sleep in the middle of a flaming forest.
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  In the basilica of Saint-Denis, the royal necropolis, the Court was attending the burial of Philip the Fair.

  Drawn side by side in the central nave, facing the new tomb, the whole Capet tribe were present in sombre and sumptuous mourning: the princes of the blood, the lay peers, the ecclesiastical peers, the members of the Inner Council, the Grand Almoners, the High Constable, indeed all the principal dignitaries of the Crown.

  The Lord Chamberlain, followed by five officers of the household,4 advanced with solemn tread to the edge of the open vault into which the body had already been lowered, threw into the cavity the carved wand which was the insignia of his office, and pronounced the formula which officially marked the change of reign: ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’

  After him, all present repeated: ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’

  And the cry from a hundred throats resounded from bay and arch and pillar and re-echoed among the high vaults.

  The Prince with the lack-lustre eyes, narrow shoulders and hollow chest who, at this moment, had become Louis X, felt a curious sensation in the nape of his neck, as if stars were bursting there. His whole body was seized by an agonizing chill and he was afraid of falling down in a swoon. He began to pray for himself as he had never prayed for anyone in the world.

  On his right hand his two brothers, Philippe, Count of Poitiers, and Prince Charles, who had not as yet acquired a territorial estate, gazed fixedly at the tomb, their hearts constricted by the emotion every man must feel, be he child of poverty or king’s son, at the moment his father’s body is lowered into the earth.