The Strangled Queen

by Maurice Druon

  Valois looked irritably at Artois. ‘What an odd little man you have brought me,’ he seemed to be implying, ‘and having talked at this length, am I to get nothing in the end?’

  ‘Listen, banker,’ cried Artois, rising, ‘you may not have this sum of money, but I know very well that you can get it for us if you want to. What interest do you require? What favours do you want?’

  ‘But none, Monseigneur, no favours at all,’ protested Tolomei; ‘neither from you, you know it very well, nor from Monseigneur of Valois, whose protection is so dear to me. I am merely trying to think how I can help you.’

  Then, turning, once again towards the silver foot, he added softly, ‘Monseigneur of Valois has just said that he wants to return to the good old custom of Monseigneur Saint Louis. But what does he mean by that? Are all the old customs to be brought back into use?’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied Valois not well understanding what the other was leading up to.

  ‘For instance, is the right of the great barons to mint money within their domains to be reintroduced?’

  The two lords looked at each other as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon them. How had they failed to think of that one before?

  Indeed, the unification of the currency throughout the kingdom, as well as the royal monopoly in issuing it, were institutions of Philip the Fair. Before that, the great lords minted or had minted for them, concurrently with the royal coinage, their own gold and silver coins which had currency within their domains; and they drew huge profits from the privilege. And those who, like the Lombard bankers, furnished the raw metal and played the exchanges between one province and another found it equally profitable.

  Charles of Valois at once saw himself re-establishing his fortune.

  ‘Do you also mean, Monseigneur,’ went on Tolomei, still gazing at the reliquary as if he were valuing it in his mind, ‘that you will re-establish the right to private war between the barons?’

  This was another feudal custom which Philip the Fair had abolished so as to prevent the great vassals from causing bloodshed, at the slightest excuse, within the kingdom in order to regulate their differences, establish their glory, or banish their boredom.

  ‘Oh, if we could do that again,’ cried Robert of Artois, ‘I should soon recover my county from my bitch of an Aunt Mahaut.’

  ‘If you need arms for your troops,’ said Tolomei, ‘I can obtain them for you at the lowest possible prices from the Tuscan armourers.’

  ‘Messire Tolomei, you have exactly expressed the things I want to accomplish,’ cried Valois, ‘and that is why I ask you to join with me in all confidence.’

  He had already made the banker’s suggestions his own, and within the hour would announce them as his own ideas.

  Tolomei was also dreaming in his own way, for great financiers are no less imaginative than great conquerors, and it is a mistake to think that behind their calculations there exist no abstract thoughts of power.

  The Captain-General of the Lombards already saw himself supplying the great barons of the kingdom with raw gold, and encouraging their differences in order to sell them arms.

  ‘Well,’ asked Charles of Valois, ‘have you now decided to supply me with the money I want?’

  ‘Perhaps, Monseigneur, perhaps; that is to say, I cannot give it to you myself, but I can find it for you in Italy, which is particularly lucky since it is precisely there that your embassy is going. I will guarantee it, which is a big risk, but I am prepared to take it, from the desire I have to serve you. Naturally, Monseigneur, it will be necessary for a man of mine, bearing letters of credit, to accompany your envoy so as to take charge of the money and account for it.’

  Monseigneur of Valois frowned; these conditions did not please him at all; he would have preferred to receive the money direct and keep some of it to meet his own most urgent needs.

  ‘You see, Monseigneur,’ said Tolomei, ‘I shall not be alone in this matter; the Italian companies are still more cautious than we are, and I must give them every assurance that they are not being duped.’

  In fact, what he really wanted was to have an agent with the expedition who could report to him everything that happened.

  ‘And who will you send who will not cut a poor figure beside Messire de Bouville?’ asked Valois.

  ‘I shall see, Monseigneur, I shall see. I have but few people.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Artois, ‘do you not send the boy who went to England for me?’

  ‘My nephew Guccio?’ asked Tolomei.

  ‘That’s the one, your nephew. He’s intelligent, shrewd and good-looking. He’ll be able to help our friend Bouville, who undoubtedly speaks but little Italian, upon the journey. I assure you, Cousin,’ said Artois to Valois, ‘that the boy is worthy of the job.’

  ‘I shall miss him in my business,’ said the banker, ‘but that can’t be helped. Monseigneur, I give him to you. It’s fated that you should always get what you want of me.’

  When Messire Spinello Tolomei had left the study, Robert of Artois stretched himself and said, ‘You see, Cousin, you see I was not mistaken.’

  ‘And do you know what made up his mind for him? It was that!’ replied Valois, indicating with a graceful gesture his grandfather’s foot. ‘Thank God, all respect for what is noble has not been lost in France. The kingdom can be set to rights.’

  That night a young man was overcome with mingled satisfaction and impatient hope; it was Louis The Hutin when his uncle told him that Bouville’s embassy would leave before two days were out.

  But another young man, when given the same news by his uncle, appeared less delighted; he was Guccio Baglioni.

  ‘What, Nephew!’ cried Tolomei. ‘Here you are offered a wonderful journey, the opportunity of seeing Naples, the Court of Naples, of living among princes, making friends among them – if you are not un idioto completo! – of seeing a conclave – and a conclave is a most remarkable thing – of learning much and enjoying yourself and you make la faccia lunga as if I were breaking bad news. You’re spoilt, my boy, and you don’t recognize your opportunities. Alas, the younger generation! Why, when I was your age, I should have leapt with joy and be already busy with my packing! To look as you do, there must be some girl you don’t want to leave; am I right?’

  Young Guccio’s olive complexion grew a little darker, which was the sign that he was blushing.

  ‘Well, well, she’ll wait for you, if she loves you,’ went on the banker. ‘Women are made for waiting. One always finds them again. And if you are afraid that she does not love you enough, profit by those you will meet on the journey. There is but one thing one never finds again; that is youth, and time to travel about the world.’

  As he looked at his nephew, Spinello Tolomei thought to himself, ‘How strange life is! Here is this boy who, barely arrived from Sienna, went to London upon the intrigues of Monseigneur of Artois which brought the scandal of the Princesses of Burgundy to a head and forced The Hutin to separate from his wife; and now he is going off again to Naples to find him another wife. There must be some affinity in the stars between my nephew and the new King; their destinies seem to be linked. Who knows, perhaps Guccio will become a very great personage? I must ask Martin, the astrologer, to study these matters with care.’

  5

  A Castle by the Sea

  THERE ARE CITIES THAT defy the centuries; time does not change them. Empires succeed each other, civilizations leave their remains in them like geological strata, but they preserve their character through the ages, their peculiar ambience, the sound and rhythm which distinguish them from all other cities upon earth. Naples is one of these cities, and appears to the traveller today, as it was in the Middle Ages, and doubtless a thousand years before, half-African, half-Latin, with its terraced alleys, its street-cries, its smells of olive oil, charcoal, saffron and frying fish, its sun-coloured dust, the sound of bells ringing on the necks of horses and of mules.

  The Greeks founded it, the Romans conquered it, the ba
rbarians despoiled it, the Byzantines and the Normans each in turn took possession of it as masters. But they did no more than modify a little the architecture of its houses and add certain superstitions, a few legends, to the traditions of its streets.

  The population is neither Greek, Roman nor Byzantine; the people are Neopolitan in perpetuity, a population distinct from all others in the world. Their gaiety is but a façade concealing the tragedy of poverty, their magniloquence an accent relieving the monotony of the daily round, their leisure a virtue in refusing to pretend to be busy when there is in fact nothing to do; its population is life-loving, meeting the setbacks of fate with guile, with a gift of speech and a contempt for all things military because peace never becomes boring.

  At this time the Princes of Anjou had reigned over Naples for fifty years. The two permanent signs of their rule were the woollen industry in the suburbs and the residential quarter they had built by the sea, dominated by the huge Castel Nuovo, the work of the French architect Pierre de Chaulnes, an immense pile rising above the skyline which the Neapolitans, subject for thousands of years to phallic superstitions, had immediately baptized, because of its shape, il Maschio Angiovino, the Male Angevin.

  One morning at the beginning of January 1315, in a room high in this castle, floored with huge white paving-stones, Roberto Oderisi, a young Neopolitan painter of the Giotto school, was gazing at the portrait he had just finished. Standing motionless before his easel, a paint-brush held horizontally between his teeth, he could not tear himself away from the contemplation of his picture upon which the fresh paint still shone with a liquid light. He was wondering whether a touch of some paler yellow, or perhaps of a yellow slightly more orange, would not have rendered better the brilliance of the golden hair, whether the forehead was pale enough, whether the eye, the exquisite, blue, rather round eye, was lifelike. The drawing was correct, most certainly, the drawing was perfect! But the expression? Upon what does expression depend? A mere white dot upon the iris? A heavier shadow at the corner of an eyelid? How could one ever, merely by placing ground colours in juxtaposition, capture the reality of a face and the strange variations of light upon the contours of forms? Perhaps after all it was not the eye but a matter of the proportions between the eye and the nose, perhaps not even a question of proportion, a translucence lacking at the nostril, or perhaps some relation that he had failed to establish between the sedate contour of the lips and the droop of the eyelids.

  ‘Well, Signor Oderisi, is it finished?’ asked the beautiful Princess who was his model.

  For a week she had spent three hours a day sitting still in this room, while her portrait was being painted for the Court of France.

  Through the huge ogival window, now wide open, could be seen the spars of ships of the orient trade rocking gently at their moorings, and beyond them the prospect of the Bay of Naples, an immense vista of sea, astonishingly blue under the glare of the sun and the eternal shape of Vesuvius. There was a soft breeze and the day was gorgeously fine.

  Oderisi took the paint-brush from between his teeth.

  ‘Alas,’ he replied, ‘it is finished.’

  ‘Why alas?’

  ‘Because I shall now be deprived of the happiness of seeing Donna Clemenzia every morning, and it will be as if the sun has gone out.’

  This was merely a minor compliment, for to tell a Neapolitan woman, whether she be princess or merely serving-maid in a hotel, that one will fall gravely ill at not seeing her again is but the minimum obligation of courtesy.

  ‘Besides, Madam, besides,’ he went on, ‘I say alas because this portrait is not a success. It does not reproduce the beauty of the reality.’

  One might have thought that he was in fact displeased with himself; and indeed, in criticizing himself, he was sincere. He was suffering the despair of the artist before his finished work, when he thinks, ‘There, I must leave my picture as it is, because I can do no better, yet it is inferior to my conception, to what I had dreamed of accomplishing!’ This young man, no more than seventeen years old, had already the characteristics of a great painter.

  ‘May I see it?’ asked Clémence of Hungary.

  ‘Of course, Madam, but don’t criticize me too severely. Alas, it is my master Giotto who should have painted you.’

  Indeed, Giotto had been sent for by a courier despatched across the length of Italy. But the Tuscan master, who was that year busy painting the fresco of the life of St Francis of Assisi upon the walls of the choir of Santa Croce of Florence, had replied, from the summit of his scaffolding, that his young Neapolitan disciple should be offered the commission.15

  Clémence of Hungary rose to her feet and, with a susurration of the stiff folds of her silken dress, went to the easel. Tall, thin, lissom, she had more grandeur than grace, and perhaps more nobility in her demeanour than femininity. But the somewhat severe impression created by her demeanour was compensated by the purity of her features, by the tender wondering look in her eyes, and by a peculiar radiation which suffused and emanated from her.

  ‘But Signor Oderisi,’ she cried, ‘you have painted me as more beautiful than I am!’

  ‘I have done no more than draw your features, Donna Clemenzia, though I have also tried to paint your soul.’

  ‘Well, I should wish to see myself as you see me, and that my looking-glass had as much talent as you.’

  They smiled at each other, mutually thanking each other for the compliments.

  ‘Let us hope that this portrait of me will please the King of France. I mean my uncle, the Count of Valois,’ she added, somewhat confused.

  She had blushed. At twenty-two she still blushed often and, knowing it, looked upon it as a weakness. How often had her grandmother, Queen Marie of Hungary, not said to her: ‘Clémence, when one is a princess and may become a queen, one really does not blush!’

  Good God, was it really conceivable that she might become a queen? With her eyes upon the sea, she dreamed of her distant cousin, of this unknown king who had asked her to be his wife, and of whom she had heard so much during the last fortnight, ever since an official ambassador had arrived from Paris at a time when he was least expected.

  The fat Bouville had managed to present the young Louis X as an unhappy prince, who had been betrayed and who had suffered, but who was endowed with a handsome face and every good quality of mind and heart. As for the Court of France, it was quite as pleasant as the Court of Naples, mingling as it did family happiness and the pomps of majesty. Nothing could have seemed more seductive to a young woman of Clémence of Hungary’s nature than the thought of healing the mental wounds of a man who had suffered through the betrayal of an unworthy woman, and who was also hard hit by the premature death of a father whom he had adored. As far as Clémence was concerned, love was inseparable from fidelity. And, above all, she had the additional pride of having been chosen. For a fortnight she had lived in a state of beatitude and was overflowing with gratitude towards the Creator of the universe.

  A wall-hanging, embroidered with emperors, lions and eagles, was pulled aside, and a slim young man with a thin nose, ardent, gay eyes, and very dark hair, entered bowing.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Signor Baglioni,’ cried Clémence of Hungary in a happy voice.

  She very much liked the young Siennese who appeared to serve Bouville as secretary, and seemed also to be one of the heralds of her happiness.

  ‘Madam,’ said Guccio Baglioni, ‘Messire de Bouville has sent me to ask if he may have his daily audience with you?’

  ‘Most certainly,’ replied Clémence; ‘you know that it is always a great pleasure to me to see Messire de Bouville. But come over here and tell me what you think of the picture which is now finished.’

  ‘I say this, Madam,’ replied Guccio, having remained silent for a moment before the picture; ‘that this portrait is wonderfully faithful and that it parades before the eye the most beautiful woman that I have ever admired.’

  Oderisi, his forearms stained with ochre an
d vermilion, drank in the praise.

  ‘But are you not in love with some French woman, as I understood?’ asked Clémence smiling.

  ‘Certainly, I am in love,’ said Guccio rather surprised.

  ‘Well, in that case, Messire Guccio, you are either insincere towards her or towards me, for I have always heard that for someone in love there is no more beautiful face in the world than the loved one’s.’

  ‘The lady who has my love and who returns it,’ replied Guccio quickly, ‘is certainly the most beautiful woman in the world … after you, Donna Clemenzia, and to state the truth is not to fail in love.’

  Clémence amused herself by teasing him a little. For since he had been in Naples, lived at Court, and found himself concerned in the preparations for a king’s marriage, the nephew of banker Tolomei was inclined to adopt the airs of a hero of chivalry overcome with love for a distant beauty, and was prone, at times, to sigh in the most touching way. In fact, his passion was kept happily subordinate to the journey; his melancholy had disappeared after two days of travel and he had not lost thereby a single pleasure the mission could afford him.

  Princess Clémence, already half-affianced, had suddenly become aware of curiosity and sympathy for the love affairs of other people; she wanted every young man and every young girl on earth to be happy.

  ‘If God wills that I should go to France’ – like everyone about her, she spoke of the proposal in elaborate circumlocutions – ‘I shall have the greatest pleasure in meeting her of whom you think so much and whom you will, I think, marry.’

  ‘Oh, Madam, pray heaven that you come to France! You will have no better servant than I and, I am sure, no more devoted servant than she.’

  And he bent his knee with the grandest air in the world, as if he were kneeling before the ladies’ box at a tournament. She thanked him with a gesture of her hands; she had beautiful, tapering hands, a little too long perhaps, like those of saints in frescoes.