by Iain Pears
By instinct he took the pose of his old master Lorenzetti, leaning against a wall, sheets of precious, expensive paper on a plank of wood, charcoals in his pocket where they could be found quickly if one broke. He did his best to be discreet, but it was impossible to remain there for long without being noticed. Too many young women and their chaperones passed by, sneaking a little look at the paper as they passed, then whispering to their friends. It was an event now; Avignon was a huge city, its streets normally full of entertainments, jugglers and dancers and penitents and musicians, vendors of all sorts of goods, beggars and mendicants, but the imminent threat of the plague had closed down most diversions. The smallest novelty was now seized on and subjected to ceaseless comment, and a young, handsome painter directing his attentions at Isabelle de Fréjus was too much of a curiosity to pass unnoticed.
In due course, Isabelle marched straight over and, with a boldness that often marked her, demanded to see what he was doing, together with an explanation. It was an encounter witnessed by everyone, who gathered around quite openly to hear what they hoped would provide much diversion. Pisano had his speech ready; he had prepared it for use many months before when he began his furtive thefts of other people’s faces, but had never before had occasion to use it.
“Dearest lady,” he began, “I must beg your pardon for acting in such a way. I am a painter, engaged in a work of the greatest importance, decorating a church with the lives of a saint and of the Magdalen. I wish to depict the Magdalen as she was, famed for her beauty, kindness, and sanctity, and yet have no model in my mind of how to do so. Then one day, a friend whose name I will not—need not—mention, told me of a lady he knew whose loveliness was such that heaven itself could scarcely contain anything of greater merit. I scoffed at him for a fool, and he led me into the street one day when you were passing.
“Once I had seen you, I fell on my knees before him, in the mud though it was, and begged his forgiveness for having doubted his word, rebuking him only for his restraint in his descriptions of you. For I saw in your beauty my Magdalen, and ever since, I have been unable to work. Your face appears in my mind whenever I try, and in my dreams I know that this lady must have had something of your charms.
“And so I have sneaked around like a beggar these last few days, with my paper and charcoal, snatching a little sketch here and a likeness there. It is unforgivable in me, I know, but a heavenly command cannot be ignored so easily.”
A little round of applause greeted these words, limited only by the fact that Pisano’s accent was so execrable that some of his phrasing was lost. It didn’t matter; he was playing with her, enjoying the attentions of a beautiful woman. It was meaningless; he would have said the same to any pretty girl he was caught sketching; someone whose face was worth sketching deserved such compliments, and would be forgotten the moment the next presented itself for study.
But Isabelle frowned, and tried to disguise her pleasure. “I would have thought, sir, that if my face was so much in your mind then you might have been able to remember what I looked like without following me around like a puppy dog. Or perhaps your mind is so weak it cannot hold an idea for very long?”
Pisano grinned at her. “This friend of mine tells me that the apprehension of true beauty is hard. We may approach it, and feel it, but we are too corrupted to keep it within us for long. This is my great tragedy, for however much I look, and however much I sketch, all I can take with me when I leave your presence is the palest reflection, as inferior to your beauty as man himself is below the beauty of the angels.”
An easy reply, for Olivier had once talked to him of his manuscript, and used such an example to try to explain what it meant—or what Gersonides thought it meant. From then on, however, Pisano was on his own and had to do the best he could. He disguised the sudden drop in the quality of his eloquence by deciding it was high time that he was overcome with remorse and shame at his impertinence. This allowed him to give ever shorter replies and pack up his paper.
“May I see this sketch you have done of me?”
He was ready for that, as well. He had worked up a little miniature in colors, a few inches square, and a fine thing; it was oval, and around the bottom he had carefully written her name. It ended up in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon, eventually, after passing through many hands before it was acquired at a sale in Paris in 1885. Isabelle gasped as she saw it.
“Keep it, my lady, if you wish. For now I have seen the original close up, I realize how feeble my hand is and cannot bear even to look at it.”
Can anyone really resist the flattery of image-taking? Can, in particular, a young girl of scarcely eighteen, conscious of her appeal and disenchanted with her husband, remain cold when given a portrait that—despite Pisano’s false modesty—was remarkably good considering the primitive nature of portaiture at the time, complimenting at the same time it remained true to the original? She ran home and put the little picture in a missal, where it remained until long after her death, and every time she prayed she opened it at that page and gazed again.
Was it in any way surprising that, as she prayed and looked and remembered, all at the same time, imagining that this was how she existed in the young Italian’s heart, she was certain that at last she had fallen in love?
THE PLAGUE REACHED Avignon the following month, at the beginning of March 1348, when even near the Mediterranean there is little enough to be cheerful about, and when months of winds have already sapped the vitality of all those exposed to them, wearying their bodies and enervating their souls. The most likely direction was from Marseille, a sailor or a priest or a trader on a boat carrying the infection with him, then traveling inland, up the river to present a petition at the curia or hawk his wares around the market or merely return to his family. Had it not been this unknown person, it would certainly have been another the next day or the next week, for no place was immune; everywhere was touched sooner or later.
The records for the city are slim, but it is certain that almost everyone knew that the pestilence was coming. Travelers’ tales from the Levant, from Sicily, and from Genoa or Florence had traveled a little bit faster than the plague itself, just fast enough to frighten or alarm, but not fast enough to allow anyone to do anything. And there were many who felt that nothing should be done, in Avignon of all places. Such a visitation was manifestly the will of God, his chastisement to a worldly city, a sinful church, and a corrupt population. Some felt almost a satisfaction at the prospect of punishment, as confirmation of their condemnation; others even prayed for such an event to sweep away the foul stench of worldliness and bring men back to God and their senses. Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world. Equally, however much an act of God, there is always someone ready to take responsibility for any event or, failing that, to have blame thrust upon them.
As the plague first broke out in the rue des Lices in one of the poorest parts of town—a grim street of leaky hovels that the nearby monastery wished to demolish if it could evict the occupants—and the first victim was an ordinary day laborer, the arrival of the death initially passed largely unnoticed. Not until twenty were already dead did the first priest come to the scene, and it is to his credit that, though his flesh crept and he was stricken with terror, and even though he had to leave for twenty minutes to throw up in the street outside, nonetheless he returned to the bedsides of those within and did his duty. What he saw was so revolting he could not believe he was truly looking at a human being. The body was so covered with eruptions and pustules all its form had been lost, the face had disappeared, leaving only a gaping mouth streaming with pus and blood, that still managed to cry out in agony. The stench of corruption and decay was unlike anything he had ever smelled before, gripping his guts and making him retch. His name was Rufinus, and even though he was a man of no other virtue and, indeed, was generally hated in his parish for his idleness and greed, this o
ne act should be recorded of him. It was a noble deed, and the better for being performed in abject terror rather than in tranquil confidence. For Rufinus conquered fear, and the example he set was not so often emulated in the weeks to come. Moreover, his courage would have been tarnished had it come from confidence in divine mercy, for such magnitude was denied him; within fifteen hours he felt the first hideous pain that announced imminent death to its victim. Twelve hours after that he was dead, having suffered such agonies that his final release was, at last, a true manifestation of mercy.
Those few hours were more than enough to turn Avignon from a thriving mercantile city, full of self-confidence and bustle, of goldsmiths and jewelers, cloth merchants and sellers of food and wine, bankers and lawyers, into a mass of terrified humanity, each individual with no thought but of their own impending end. Twenty people died the first day; sixty the second, one hundred the day after that. At its peak, five hundred a day were dying, more than could be buried, and the rotting corpses piled up and became a source of disease on their own. Within a week, travelers could tell where the corpses were being taken from the thick black cloud of flies hovering overhead, the noise of the buzzing audible long before the smell could be detected. After that, the fires lit to consume the corpses threw up a thick column of smoke and deposited a thin layer of ash over the nearby streets.
The city collapsed; trade stopped, no food came in, the merchants packed their bags, the streets remained unswept and rapidly became filthy. All those little services that enable huge numbers of people to live crammed together in a small space vanished overnight. Fresh water, bread, all the basics of daily existence became scarce until the pope himself intervened to order men back to their jobs. The rich fled, many priests and cardinals amongst them, but accomplished little except to take the infection farther afield before they, too, died. Others stayed, from lassitude or defiance, and died in their turn. The lucky ones were those who were already outside the city before the plague hit, and who had the good sense to remain there. But it was luck that decided who lived and who died; men were like soldiers ambushed in the night, not knowing who their assailant was, where it came from, how it might be fended off.
Ceccani was one of the few who was not afraid; his iron will and belief in divine favor rather led him to see the onslaught as an opportunity. What he wished to accomplish was perfectly clear in his mind; how to do it was less certain. He wanted to make sure the papacy went back to Rome, and had become the discreet leader of the faction in the curia that held that every day that the pope remained in corrupt, venal, greedy Avignon was an extra offense to God. As long as the papacy was there, it was subject to France, that barbarian nation from the north. The pope was French, as was his predecessor, and so would his successor be, in all probability. The cardinalate dare not even cast a vote without gaining the king of France’s approval. Not that this implied disdain for the current incumbent, whose only sin, in Ceccani’s eyes, was his country of origin. He admired Clement greatly, considered him a true prince, a man of stature who filled the throne well. Nonetheless, that throne was in the wrong place.
The plague itself was a sign of divine disapproval, a punishment meted out against the whole of mankind for this error. It was also the opportunity to restore the situation, and Ceccani realized this immediately. The theological and the political blended so perfectly it was impossible to tell them apart; there was, in fact, no distinction to him at all. It was the destiny, the right, the obligation of the papacy to reign supreme over all temporal rulers. This could not happen in Avignon, and so the pope must leave. It was God’s will, and God had now provided the means to ensure His will was obeyed.
However, Clement VI did not want to leave; he had committed himself to vast building projects—his palace, churches, walls—that underscored in stone and gold an ever more likely permanency. So he would have to be persuaded and, failing that, forced to return. The Comte de Fréjus in his way became part of God’s plan.
Necessarily so; for Ceccani was aware that his desires were in a distinct minority in the palace. The influence of France had been exerted for so long that far too many of the cardinals were French; the life was settled, prosperous, and more satisfying than that of Rome, that decrepit, violence-ridden, bug-infested ruin of a city. Such people, led by Cardinal de Deaux, held that the days of Rome were done and, just as the church had once thrown off the empire and emerged the stronger for it, so now it could discard Rome itself. Tradition said the leader of the church must be Bishop of Rome; it did not say he should live there, and as a man possessed of four bishoprics he had never visited, Ceccani might have looked more sympathetically on this argument than, in fact, he did.
For Ceccani, power-hungry and ruthless though he was, had a soul touched by the sublime; it was what led him to patronize Olivier, to collect manuscripts, to accumulate one of the first collections of Roman coins and antiquities. He was fascinated by Rome; he believed—and held that others should so believe as well—that the church in Rome was a greater thing than the church in Avignon. That only in Rome could it play out its allotted role as the true heir of the empire, and re-create that empire in a new form. He aimed high, higher than any man alive, and was prepared to stoop low to achieve his dreams. He would open Aigues-Mortes to the English, strip the king of France of his only Mediterranean port, strike a blow against him that could never be forgiven. And in so doing would set the French against the Countess of Provence, the owner of Avignon. She would cancel the lease the papacy held on the city, and the whole curia would have to leave. Where would it go then? Where could it go, but back to the place it should never have left?
IT IS A MATTER of record that Marcel had a good war. When the lightning strike of the German military hit France, he was a sous-préfet west of Burgundy, and took upon himself the task of organizing relief for the tens of thousands of refugees flowing through his département like a human river. He instructed the officials he did not need that they should fly, and took over the whole area when his superior disappeared as well.
On the evening of 21 June, four hundred soldiers took up a defensive position by the river Loire, another fifty mined and defended the main bridge into the town. From a hurried visit, he learned that these men—mainly Senegalese—had been instructed to hold the river crossing as long as possible, then blow it up. The captain in charge had not slept for days, and already looked like a man defeated.
“The Germans are about a day behind us. The division needs a couple of days to regroup so it can counterattack. We have to delay them. There are two crossings, and if both are held, the Germans can be stopped.”
“They’ll shell the town.”
The captain shrugged without interest. “Yes,” he said. “More than likely.”
By the time he got back to his office, a delegation from the town council was waiting for him. The mayor had fled, and they knew nothing of what was going on. Marcel explained, and as he did so he saw the panic spread across their faces.
“They’ll destroy the town,” one said. “There will be nothing left.”
Marcel nodded.
“Is there nothing you can do, sir?” another asked.
He made up his mind. “Leave it in my hands,” he said. “Go into the country for a few days. Head south, not north. I will see what I can manage.”
He went back to the soldiers. “You are not to stay here,” he said. “Your task is hopeless, and all you will accomplish is the destruction of my town. The army is disintegrating. The war is lost.”
The captain was not interested. “I follow orders,” he said. “If I am told to stay here, here I stay. Win or lose.”
Marcel left. Half an hour later, he took a step for which he was roundly congratulated by the whole town later on, although some also considered that it was as near to treason as was possible.
What exactly he did in the next six hours is unknown. He shut himself in his office and saw no one. All that is certain is that at five that evening—a beautiful, soft s
ummer’s evening—he went back to the captain and told him the Germans had been in contact and demanded their surrender or withdrawal.
“They say they are already across the river upstream, so your task is pointless anyway. If you withdraw now, you can rejoin your battalion and continue to fight. If you don’t you will be surrounded and captured within hours.”
The captain heard him out, then hurled the glass he was carrying against the wall in blind fury. “They said they would hold that bridge,” he shouted at Marcel. “Come what may, they would hold it. They promised me. At least they promised me that.”
He turned away, not wishing the civilian official to see him in his moment of shame and humiliation, but not doubting the truth of what he was told either.
Then he straightened himself up and called his junior officer. “It’s all over. The bridge upriver has gone. We’ve got to get out of here.”
The news traveled fast. The soldiers abandoned their positions as they had apparently been abandoned by their comrades. They knew, as soldiers do by instinct, that there would be no more fighting. Many left their weapons, some already were changing out of their uniforms, wanting only to go home. Only the Senegalese troops stayed armed and uniformed. They had nowhere to go.