The Strangled Queen

by Maurice Druon

  Louis looked at her a moment without speaking.

  ‘It was not because of the sheets I sent for you,’ he said at length.

  A sweet, modest blush suffused the linen-maid’s cheeks.

  ‘Oh, Monseigneur! Sire, I mean to say! Has returning to the Palace made you remember me?’

  She had been his first mistress and that was ten years ago. The day upon which he had learnt – he was then fifteen – that he was soon to be married to a Princess of Burgundy. The Hutin had been consumed with an extraordinary frenzy to discover what love was, and at the same time was panic-stricken at the idea that he would not know how to behave towards his wife. While the marriage was being negotiated, and Marigny was engaged with Philip the Fair in weighing the territorial and military benefits of the alliance, the young prince could think of nothing else. At night he imagined all the ladies of the Court succumbing to the ardour of his desires, while during the day he was nervous and shy in their presence.

  And then one afternoon, in one of the Palace corridors, he had suddenly run into this handsome girl, walking calmly in front of him, her hands full of linen. He had thrown himself upon her with violence and anger as if he owed her a grudge for the fear that troubled him. It must be her or no one, now or never. However, he had not raped her; his agitation, his anxiety, his clumsiness would have rendered him incapable of doing so. He had demanded from Eudeline that she should teach him love. Lacking a man’s assurance, he intended to use the prerogatives of a prince. He had been lucky; Eudeline had not laughed at him, and had indeed evinced a certain pride at surrendering to the desires of a king’s son, even allowing him to believe that she had found a certain pleasure in it. She had been so successful in this that for ever after he had felt himself to be a man in her presence.

  Louis always sent for her when he was dressing himself to hunt or for the exercise of arms, and Eudeline had quickly realized that he particularly needed love when he was frightened. For several months before Marguerite came to Court, and even for some time afterwards, she had helped him, by the mere presence of her calm and generous body, to overcome his fears. And if The Hutin was capable of any hidden capacity for tenderness, he owed it to this handsome woman.

  ‘Where is your daughter?’ he asked.

  ‘She is with my mother, who is bringing her up. I didn’t want her to stay here with me; she looks too like her father,’ replied Eudeline with a half-smile.

  ‘At least,’ Louis said, ‘I believe she is mine.’

  ‘Oh, but of course, Monseigneur, she is certainly yours! Sire, I mean to say. Every day her looks became more like yours. And it could only embarrass you to let her be seen by the Palace people.’

  Because, indeed, a child, who was to be baptized Eudeline like her mother, had resulted from his hasty love-making. Any woman with a gift for intrigue would have assured her fortune by her pregnancy, and founded a line of barons. But The Hutin was so afraid of revealing the event to his father, that Eudeline had taken pity on him once again and remained silent. Her husband, who was clerk to Messire de Nogaret, had had some difficulty in accepting the fact that her pregnancy was due to a miracle which had, curiously enough, taken place while he was accompanying the Justiciar along the roads of Provence. He had protested so much that Eudeline had at last admitted the facts. The same kind of men are always attracted to the same kind of women. The clerk was not very courageous, and as soon as he knew from whom the gift came, his fear overwhelmed his anger as rain allays the wind. He too kept silent and arranged matters so that he might be absent from Paris as much as possible. He had, moreover, died soon afterwards, less from sorrow than from dysentery.

  And Dame Eudeline had continued to manage the Palace washing, at the rate of fivepence per hundred pieces washed. She had become first linen-maid, which in the royal household was a position of middling importance.

  During all this period the little Eudeline was growing up in that peculiar insolence common to bastards, that they bear upon their features the characteristics of their illegitimacy. But very few people knew about it.

  Dame Eudeline always said to herself that one day The Hutin would remember. He had made so many promises, so solemnly sworn that when he became king he would lavish wealth and titles upon her daughter, and that she had everything to gain by waiting till that day!

  She now thought that she had been right to believe him, surprised that he was so promptly fulfilling his promises. ‘He really has a certain kindness of heart,’ she thought. ‘He is eccentric, but not ill-natured.’

  Moved by her memories, by the thought of times past, by the strangeness of fate, she gazed at this sovereign who had found in her arms the first expression of his anxious virility, and who was now there before her, clothed in a nightshirt and sitting in an armchair, his hair falling to the level of his chin, his hands clasped about his knees. ‘Why did this happen to me?’ she said to herself. ‘Why should it have happened to me?’

  ‘How old is my daughter now?’ he asked. ‘Nine, isn’t she?’

  ‘Just nine, Sire.’

  ‘I will give her the precedence of a princess as soon as she is old enough to marry. I wish it. And what can I do for you?’

  He needed her. It was now or never to ask for rewards. Discretion counts for nothing with the great ones of the earth, and one must quickly take advantage of their momentary disposition to satisfy one’s ambition. Because, later on, they inevitably feel themselves freed of their gratitude simply by having made the offer, and they forget to give. The Hutin would happily have spent the whole night discussing the benefits he would lavish upon her, merely so that Eudeline should keep him company till dawn. But, surprised by his question, she was content to reply, ‘What you will, Sire.’

  And then, since he was never much inclined to consider other people, he began thinking only of himself again.

  ‘Oh, Eudeline, Eudeline!’ he cried. ‘I should have sent for you earlier and got you to come to the Hôtel de Nesle where I have been very unhappy these many months.’

  ‘I know, Monseigneur Louis, that you have been very badly treated by your wife. But I would not have dared to come to you; I did not know whether you would have been glad or ashamed to see me again.’

  He was no longer listening to her. He, too, had his vivid memories. His huge blue eyes, turned upon her, gleamed in the glow of the night-light. Eudeline well knew what that look meant. He had had it at fifteen, and never would have other in a woman’s presence.

  ‘Lie down,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Do you mean there, Monseigneur, I mean to say, Sire?’ she murmured, somewhat afraid, indicating Philip the Fair’s bed.

  ‘Yes, there, that’s what I do mean,’ replied The Hutin in a hoarse voice.

  Between what seemed to her sacrilege on the one hand and disobedience on the other, what could she do? After all, he was now King, and the bed was his. She took off her nightcap, let her dressing-gown and nightdress fall, and her golden tresses flowed down her back. She was rather stouter than she had been, but still had a beautifully curved waist, a broad and reassuring back, a silken thigh upon which the light played. All her gestures were submissive, and it was precisely this submissiveness that The Hutin was in need of. He watched her mount the little oaken steps to get into bed and thought that, as a warming-pan overcame its chill, so this beautiful body would overcome the demons that haunted it.

  A little anxious and bewildered, but above all submitting to her destiny, Eudeline had slipped beneath the golden counterpane.

  ‘He was right,’ she thought immediately; ‘these new sheets scratch! I knew it.’

  Louis had feverishly taken off his nightshirt; narrow of chest, bony of shoulder, heavily clumsy, he threw himself upon her with a desperate haste, as if he could not risk deferring for one instant the opportunity that was now his.

  A vain haste. In certain things kings are like other men; they cannot control everything. The Hutin’s desires were largely cerebral. Clutching Eudeline’s shoulders, as
might a drowning man a lifebuoy, he strove with every feint to overcome an impotence which seemed beyond hope. ‘Certainly, if he was unable to honour Madame Marguerite with more satisfactory attentions than these,’ Eudeline said to herself, ‘one can see why she deceived him.’

  Every silent encouragement that she gave him, all the efforts he made, which certainly had none of the appearance of a prince marching to victory, remained unsuccessful. At last he sat up, trembling, defeated, ashamed, hesitating between rage and tears.

  She tried to calm him. ‘You have walked a long way today. And you got very cold,’ she said. ‘You must also be sad at heart, and it’s quite natural upon the evening of the day you have buried your father; it can happen to anyone, you know.’

  With staring eyes he looked at the beautiful fair woman, so available but so inaccessible, stretched out before him as if she were the incarnation of some mythological punishment.

  She gazed at him with compassion.

  ‘It’s all due to that bitch!’ he said. ‘It’s all her fault.’

  Eudeline drew away from him, thinking that the insult was meant for her.

  ‘I was thinking of Marguerite. I cannot help thinking of her, seeing her in my imagination. And this bed is accursed too!’ he cried. ‘To sleep in it is to sleep in misfortune!’

  ‘No, Monseigneur Louis,’ she replied gently, drawing him to her. ‘No, it’s a fine bed, but it is the bed of a king. I understand very well; to free yourself of your impotence, you must put a queen in it.’

  She was moved, and being modest was not in the least put out, since she was a good-natured creature. ‘Do you really think so, Eudeline?’ he asked, gazing at her.

  ‘Of course, Monseigneur Louis; I am sure of it; in a king’s bed there should be a queen,’ she repeated.

  ‘Perhaps I shall soon have one. It seems that she is fair like you.’

  ‘That is a great compliment you are paying me,’ replied Eudeline.

  And she turned her face away to hide the wound that he had just dealt her heart.

  ‘It seems that she is very beautiful,’ went on The Hutin, ‘and extremely virtuous. She lives in Naples.’

  ‘Of course, Monseigneur Louis, of course. I am sure that she will make you happy. Now you must try to go to sleep.’

  She had drawn his head down on to her warm, lavender-smelling shoulder. She listened maternally to his dreaming aloud of this unknown woman, of this distant princess whose place tonight she had so vainly taken. With the mirage of the future he consoled himself for the misfortunes of the past and the disappointments of the present.

  ‘Of course, Monseigneur Louis, that is exactly the kind of wife you need. You will see how virile you will be with her.’

  At last he grew silent. And Eudeline remained still, not daring to move, thinking, staring wide-eyed at the flickering glow of the night-light, waiting for dawn to release her.

  The King of France slept.

  PART TWO

  DOG EATS DOG

  1

  The Hutin’s First Council

  EVERY DAY FOR THE last sixteen years Enguerrand de Marigny had known that when he went into the Council Chamber he would find friends there. But this morning he had hardly entered the room when he felt with certainty that everything had changed. He stood still for a moment, his left hand at the collar of his robe, his right hand gripping his file of documents.

  There were more or less the same number of people as usual sitting on each side of the long table, while the fire on the hearth crackled and filled the room with the familiar odour of burning wood. It was the faces that were no longer the same.

  Certainly, the members of the royal family, who by right and tradition attended the Inner Council, were present; the Counts of Valois and Evreux, the Count of Poitiers and the young Prince Charles; the Constable Gaudier de Châtillon; but they no longer sat in their accustomed places, and Monseigneur of Valois had installed himself upon the right of the royal chair, where ordinarily Marigny sat.

  Nor were Raoul de Presles, or Nicole le Loquetier, or Guillaume Dubois, eminent justiciars, faithful servants of Philip the Fair, present. New men had taken their places: Mathieu de Trye, Chamberlain to Louis X, Etienne de Mornay, Chancellor to the Count of Valois, and others besides, whom Marigny knew but with whom he had never worked.

  It was not exactly a change of ministry, but rather, as one would say in the language of today, a remodelling of the cabinet. Of the former Councillors of the Iron King, only Hugues de Bouville and Béraud de Mercœur had been kept, doubtless because they both belonged to the great nobility. And indeed they too had been sent down to the bottom of the table. All the Councillors who had risen from the middle class had been eliminated. ‘I might at least have been told!’ thought Marigny angrily.

  Speaking to Hugues de Bouville, he asked in a loud voice, so that he might be heard by all present, ‘Is Messire de Presles ill? Have Messires de Bourdenai, de Briançon and Dubois been prevented from attending, since I see none of them here? Have they sent excuses for their absence?’

  Fat Bouville hesitated for a moment and then replied, lowering his eyes as if he were to blame, ‘I was not responsible for summoning the Council. Messire de Mornay attended to it.’

  Marigny’s expression hardened and those present awaited an outburst.

  But Monseigneur of Valois quickly intervened, saying slowly and affably, ‘You have not forgotten, my good Marigny, that the King calls whom he will to the Council in accordance with his own judgement. It is the sovereign’s right.’

  There was a certain contemptuous condescension in the phrase, ‘My good Marigny,’ which did not escape the Rector of the kingdom. Never would Valois have spoken to him in that manner during Philip the Fair’s life. Marigny very nearly replied that, if it was in fact the King’s right to summon to his Council whom he pleased, it was also his duty to choose its members from men who understood affairs of state, and that people did not become competent in these matters in twenty-four hours.

  But he preferred to reserve his strength for some more important argument and sat down, apparently calm, opposite Monseigneur of Valois, upon the chair left empty on the left of the royal seat.

  Enguerrand de Marigny was forty-nine years old, had red hair turning somewhat yellow with the years, a deep chest and wide shoulders. His chin was heavy and determined, his aspect rugged, his nose short with wide nostrils.

  He held his head somewhat inclined forward and seemed always about to charge like a bull with his forehead. His eyes, under heavy lids, were restless, quick and authoritative, and his hands, in their nervous slenderness, were in contrast to the heaviness of his general appearance.

  He opened his file of documents, took out papers, parchments and tablets, placing them in front of him. But failing to find beneath the table-top the hook upon which he normally hung his file, he sighed irritably and shrugged his shoulders.

  Monseigneur of Valois had begun talking to his nephew Charles, whom he was telling that a happy surprise would shortly be announced and that he counted upon his support on all points. Monseigneur of Valois, in spite of Court mourning, or perhaps because of it, was more superbly dressed than ever. The black velvet of his robe had the richness of fur and was ornamented with silver embroidery and miniver which gave him an appearance of being caparisoned like a horse in a hearse. He had no papers before him, nor any materials for taking notes. His Chancellor, Etienne de Mornay, had the subaltern duty of reading and writing: as for himself, he contented himself with talking.

  There were steps in the corridor.

  ‘Here comes Monseigneur Louis,’ said Hugues de Bouville.

  Valois was the first to get to his feet, which he did with so majestic and obvious a deference for him who entered that his manner became of itself protective.

  Louis X glanced round the standing gathering.

  ‘Messires, forgive my being late …’

  He fell silent, annoyed by what he had said.

  He had forgotten
that the King was never late, since he always entered the Council Room last.

  He was seized with the same sort of anxiety that he had felt the day before at Saint-Denis and during the previous night.

  Now was the time that he must show himself King. But it is not a state that is miraculously achieved, and Louis waited, his arms hanging loose, his eyes red from the insomnia for which his too-short sleep had not succeeded in making up. He forgot to ask the Council to sit down, or to sit down himself.

  Seconds passed, the silence became painful, and everyone felt that the King was a prey to irresolution.

  Marigny made the necessary gesture; he slightly moved the royal chair as if to make it easy for Louis to sit down.

  Louis took his seat and murmured, ‘Be seated, Messires.’

  In his mind he saw once more his father sitting in the same place and automatically assumed his usual pose: both hands flat upon the table, his glance fixed, apparently absent. This gave him sufficient assurance to turn to his two brothers and say to them in a natural voice, ‘You should know, my dear Brothers, that my first commands this morning have been on your behalf. Philippe, your Countship of Poitiers is raised to a peerage of the realm, and from now on you are numbered among the peers so that you may stand by my side, as Uncle Valois stood beside a father whom God keep, to assist me in supporting the crown. Charles, you will receive in fief and apanage the County of la Marche, which our father bought back from the Lusignan, and which he had the intention, I know, of giving you.’

  Philippe and Charles rose to their feet and went to kiss their brother’s cheek as a sign of their gratitude. Monseigneur of Valois looked towards his nephew Charles with an expression that seemed to say, ‘You see, I have done pretty well by you.’

  The others present nodded their heads with satisfaction; as a start, it was not too bad.