The Judas Cloth

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Yes, Excellency.’

  Why? wondered the nuncio. Had His Imperial Majesty got a bad conscience? Was he throwing us a sop while preparing to stab us in the back? That would be like him! Or giving us rope?

  Meanwhile, this fireball of a journalist was dangerous. Had he finished with the case? Veuillot said he had. But weren’t there other visionaries in Lourdes? More girls at the age of puberty?

  ‘Too many,’ judged Veuillot. ‘Only the first one should be promoted. The others may be hysterics. Besides, the police managed to prove that what they took for the Virgin was a stalactite.’

  He talked on, but the nuncio had stopped listening. He pitied the Bishop of Tarbes. If the Prefect, Mayor and Inspector of Police really did suffer as a result of all this, Church–State relations would be prickly for some time in the Hautes Pyrénées.

  1859–1860

  The bargain struck between Sacconi and Viterbo brought neither man luck. Viterbo, fearing a dagger in the ribs from his old confederates, accepted the offer of a passport and returned to Bologna, where, being suspected by both factions, he could get no employment, and had to live off the brother-in-law whose son he had failed to rescue.

  Things did not go well for Monsignor Sacconi either, for, by the end of 1858, he was finding it impossible to penetrate the intentions of the French Government. ‘We would,’ he wrote sorrowfully to Cardinal Antonelli, ‘need an army of spies, for lack of which I am become a haruspex and student of straws in the wind.’

  Some of these were alarming. The papal state was suddenly infested with returned exiles. Droves of them, arriving from Paris on the pretext of sharing their relatives’ New Year’s Eve lentils and boiled sausage, must surely be up to something. Piedmont was mobilising and, in an address to its parliament, the King spoke of ‘the cry of pain reaching us from so many parts of Italy’. At a January reception in Paris, the Emperor greeted the Austrian Ambassador with a hint that their countries might soon be at war. Cavour was known to be in secret contact with Louis Napoleon’s mistress or physician or both and, at the Scala in Milan, when the chorus of Bellini’s Norma invoked war, the audience sang along under the noses of the Austrian High Command, which was attending the performance. The provocations were impossible to ignore.

  Deeply apprehensive, the nuncio obtained an audience with Louis Napoleon who assured him that there was no need for anxiety. ‘Let the Pope know,’ said he, ‘that he has nothing to fear.’

  He had, though, and so had Austria, and in April the blow fell. Piedmont, by goading Austria into a declaration of war, was able to activate its defensive alliance with France, whereupon insurrections broke out all over northern Italy. Agents had been busy and a noose began to tighten around the papal state.

  Battles at Magenta and Solferino went against the Austrians.

  It looked as though the pope-king’s days were numbered when, confounding all expectations, the Emperor’s purpose seemed to falter. In July, he proposed an armistice, then made peace with Austria on condition that she hand over Lombardy. Nationalists were stunned and papal choirs prepared their Te Deums in gratitude for the state’s salvation.

  Events, however, had taken on their own momentum. The withdrawal of Austrian garrisons from the Pope’s northern territories had left agitators free to orchestrate plebiscites which resulted in a vote for annexation by Piedmont.

  Monsignor Sacconi watched with the divided eye of a man obliged, as a diplomat, to play his part, yet who found welling within him a dark pessimism over the futility of human effort. Facts, by the time he discovered them, had usually ceased to be facts, for the plan elaborated by Cavour and Louis-Napoleon was quickly superseded. Unexpected factors took over – horror of carnage, fear of the Prussians, the plots of wilder and lesser men. Was God’s finger on the chessboard? If so, He was in a punishing mood. Autonomously, it seemed, aims shifted and expanded. Tuscan moderates, fearing their own Left, requested annexation by Piedmont. Parma and Emilia wanted the same. Then, in May of 1860 Garibaldi sailed to Sicily with his red shirts and, later, ignoring the armistice, began marching towards Rome from the south. Under cover of heading him off, Cavour’s troops promptly invaded from the north. Rome was caught in a pincer grip and now the Emperor made only token efforts to restrain his ally. ‘Those who go with ideas whose time has come,’ he liked to say, ‘prosper. Those who resist them perish.’ Clearly the idea of a united Italy struck him as more timely than the temporal power of the Pope.

  For once, the Left agreed with him. Garibaldi was an optimists’ hero, a living myth. His opponents magnetised anger and, in Paris, a live rat was thrown through Monsignor Sacconi’s drawing-room windows and he was villainously caricatured in certain sectors of the press. These, however, were but pinpricks in comparison with the agony of mind he suffered while Rome urged him to discover whether or not its French garrison had orders to defend the Pope’s state, city or, failing all else, person. Napoleon had saved the Pope’s regime in 1849. Would he abandon it now?

  For God’s sake, exhorted a stream of telegrams from Cardinal Antonelli’s office, find out! Enlighten us! Give us some idea what to expect! Where should we send our own small volunteer force? North? South? What are the Emperor’s intentions?

  Neither by guile nor prayer could the nuncio discover these. Nobody in Paris seemed to be in control. Everywhere he met faces so blank as to seem featureless: white, hallucinative blurs. Nobody at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knew a thing and, unbelievably, the Emperor had gone on a Mediterranean cruise and could not be reached. On a cruise? Yes, Excellency. My God, thought Sacconi, Pontius Pilate never thought of this! For how long? Heads shook and faces appeared to be dissolving like damp soap. Sorry, Excellency. We have no information. Well, what about Monsieur de Thouvenel, the Foreign Minister? Mille regrets, Excellence! He did not come into the office today and is not at home either. We don’t … Tomorrow perhaps? But tomorrow the news was that Monsieur de Thouvenel too had gone on holiday, nobody knew where. A free-thinker’s smirk, fleeting and perhaps hallucinatory, seemed to the nuncio to slide from face to face. ‘We are not dealing with the matter, Excellency. This office has received no instructions.’

  In Rome the French Ambassador had received none either, so Cardinal Antonelli continued to bombard the harried nuncio with panicked appeals. Had Louis Napoleon a secret agreement with the Piedmontese? If so what were its terms? Had he arranged all this with Cavour? Answer. Now. Urgently. In nomine Dei.

  Sacconi, coming up against walls where once there had been doors, was reminded of Viterbo, the Jew, who had also been isolated and snubbed. He was reminded of him again when he received reports from men sent to listen in the exiles’ cafés where the printer had once been at home, for one of the rumours picked up was that Viterbo’s efforts on his nephew’s behalf had contributed to the shift of French policy. Appallingly, God, or some such ineluctable force as the dawning of an idea in the Emperor’s mind, was bent on trying men’s spirits. The Pope risked being cast down from his seat because those of low degree could now influence public opinion – a force with which, as the nuncio kept warning his masters in Rome, one must now count.

  ‘The two things Louis Napoleon holds against Pio Nono,’ a man in the know told him, ‘are his refusal to crown him emperor and the Mortara case. The second is more determining because it made French Catholics unpopular and allowed him to defy them.’

  By the time the nuncio discovered the bargain struck between Cavour and the Emperor, it had been outflanked. Piedmont had secured four-fifths of the Pope’s territories and, as a broker’s fee, given Nice and Savoy to France. Plebiscites had ratified this: vox populi vox dei. ‘Italy’, as Piedmont was now calling itself, needed God and had pressganged Him. Pius, on the grounds that the plebiscites were rigged, excommunicated all who took part in them and ordered that a Brief proclaiming this be displayed on the doors of all basilicas. He wanted it known that, whatever about the Emperor, God did not defect.

  In the end, the moral shadow of
the anathema was to touch Sacconi too, and Cardinal Antonelli would attract still bitterer blame. Whose fault was it but theirs if the gallant little international force which had volunteered to fight for the Pope was slaughtered at Castelfidardo? Treachery and misinformation, said the mourners, had delivered it to its enemies. Nobody wanted to blame the dead young men, so live older ones were blamed instead: Sacconi, Antonelli, the French Ambassador and General Goyon of the French garrison, who had led the volunteers to think he would come to their aid.

  Louis Napoleon, returning from his cruise, found his victims quarrelling among themselves. The French volunteers had been mostly monarchists, so their defeat was a bonus. Moving with an idea whose time had come had proven every bit as profitable as he had hoped, and in March 1861 the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed with Victor Emmanuel as king.

  Rome, 1861

  ‘We must be passive,’ Cardinal Amandi told Nicola. He spoke dully, for his heart was giving him trouble. Waking in the night, he could hear it boom with the rashness of a flimsy gong. ‘We must be seen to be fleeced lambs. Only if shamed will the Catholic Powers intervene to restore what is ours.’

  This was now policy. The Powers were to be God’s instrument and Rome must wait for them to hear His call. Meanwhile – this was the message with which Nicola was being briefed – France must not be alienated, nor her visionaries let say one word which could inflame an already dolorous situation. Traitor or not, the Emperor was needed!

  ‘I’ve communicated this to the bishops of Grenoble and Tarbes,’ said Amandi. ‘If they won’t listen I can do no more. My recommendation is that they muzzle those young women.’ He spoke gently in his mild, heart-sufferer’s voice.

  ‘Local piety …’ Nicola did not bother to finish. It was an old difficulty.

  The cardinal laid a testing hand on his heart. ‘I’ve lost my taste for irony’, he sighed, ‘but failure to recognise it is a weakness, and the irony of our time is that loyalty and piety can be vexatious.’

  He was thinking of the ‘Zouaves’, which was the new name for the papal volunteers. These pious adventurers had come to restore the Pope’s ravished lands and Romans marvelled idly at their optimism. But the Zouaves were simple souls from places like Ireland and Poland. Hard-drinking and outlandish, they annoyed citizens by singing loud, tuneless, prayerful songs late into the night. Monseigneur de Mérode loved them. But then, he too was a half mythic creature from another age.

  And the dreaming Pope had appointed him Pro-Minister of Arms!

  ‘He,’ said Amandi, ‘does more damage than Garibaldi. His Franco-Belgian contingent is the worst liability of all.’

  These – their officers were monarchists to a man – itched to score off the Emperor by undoing the wrong he had done. But there weren’t anything like enough Zouaves and only a mad mystic like Mérode would see them as anything but a disruptive sideshow.

  Amandi, having sacrificed his own ambitions to Antonelli and supported his polices, was indignant at Mérode’s attempts to foil them.

  ‘Is there anything,’ Nicola wondered, ‘to the story that Mérode hopes to be Cardinal Secretary himself?’

  The cardinal took a pinch of snuff. ‘There is. But I wouldn’t bet on his chances. His Holiness will see sense. Not that Mérode isn’t a good man. On the contrary. I stayed with him once and was never more edified or worse fed. He lives like an anchorite and adores practical jokes – even plays them on officers of the imperial garrison! I’m afraid that what’s left of this realm is in the hands of a saint and an adolescent.’

  ‘A saint, Eminence? You can’t mean the Pope? After his behaviour to you?’

  Amandi’s heart condition had been brought on by a series of painful scenes with Mastai, whose tantrums had become alarming. Losing his lands had possibly revived his epilepsy. The worst had been when Amandi tried to invervene on behalf of the Mortara boy.

  ‘Shsh!’ said Amandi.

  This evening Nicola was to take a message to Mérode’s friends. It was unofficial but he was to let them know that it came from the Holy Office. The Orleanist faction – Mérode’s – was not to exploit this girl, Bernadette – what was her name? asked the cardinal.

  ‘Soubirous, Eminence.’

  ‘That’s right. She is not to be turned into a Joan of Arc calling for their pretender to be crowned. Let them know we know that the Legitimists tried that with the La Salette girl, and we’re warning both groups not to start with Soubirous. She’s being carefully watched, you might add. Apart from that, enjoy your evening. You’ll eat well anyway. Foreigners keep better tables than our own thrifty aristocracy which,’ lamented Amandi, ‘imitate the least admirable aspects of the clergy’s conduct. All they learned from us is how to make a show and pass the plate.’

  *

  ‘Flavio!’

  The duke was being escorted to a distant place at table whence, at intervals during the meal, Nicola was able to catch the swivel of his smile.

  ‘You know him, do you?’ A nearby gentleman was wistful. ‘If we touch him, do you think some of his good luck will rub off? They say he trebled the fortune he was granted by the Sacra Rota.’

  ‘Later,’ said Flavio’s dumbshow to Nicola. ‘We’ll talk.’

  ‘Mind you,’ the wistful gentleman lowered his voice, ‘his luck implies that the Sacra Rota erred. Our class has used ours up. It’s an argument for bastardy. New blood calls to new money!’ Don Marcellino laughed without resentment and greeted his food festively. ‘Ortolans!’ he exclaimed. ‘The French do one proud.’

  The evening was indeed splendid, for the Orleanist Crusaders – that was their other name for themselves – had rented the piano nobile of a palace belonging to one of those Roman princes who had learned their style from the Church. Footmen moved liturgically, and candles blazed like the high altar at Easter.

  ‘Rome,’ noted Don Marcellino, ‘is already occupied by foreigners. We can no longer live like this.’ He waved at the room.

  Afloat in glitter, it was porous with false perspectives. Surfaces dissolved. Silks rippled. Solidity invited distrust, and the whole was conducive to a belief in the spirit whose creation it was. To be sure, enemies might read it differently! Nicola imagined them arriving to draw up inventories and attach price-tags. It could happen any day. Aware of a constriction in his chest, he let the lady on his left persuade him that Italy, a cobbled-up absurdity, could not hold together another month.

  ‘After all,’ she exclaimed, ‘the provinces can’t even understand each other! Did you know that when the Piedmontese landed in Sicily, the Sicilians thought they were French?’

  From down the table, a burst of laughter greeted a sally by Monseigneur de Mérode who was no doubt peddling a like optimism. In a lull, his voice rose with that messroom joviality which shocked the Curia. An English guest had asked about the castrati he had heard sing in the Sistine Chapel.

  ‘There are only four left now,’ said Mérode, ‘and my musical friends assure me that only the one called Mustafa is worth hearing. I’m told that, not long since, a compatriot of yours, milord, lured him to his lodgings and bribed him to sing. Poor Mustafa was in hot water. They’re sacred singers and not for hire.’

  ‘But how exactly – I mean what do you do to … create them?’ The Englishman was a wispy youth.

  ‘Mon cher!’ Mérode’s laugh was genial. ‘That has nothing to do with the Pope’s administration. It’s a by-product of what your countrymen call private enterprise! Our peasants, you see, raise pigs and also children. Sometimes they leave them together with unfortunate results. Pigs are greedy. Très voraces! Are you familiar with the animal? When they bite off vital bits of the children, our choirmasters make use of the victims. From,’ Mérode smiled, ‘charity’.

  ‘Is it true,’ whispered the lady on Nicola’s left, ‘that Antonelli and Mérode are at daggers drawn?’

  ‘Gossip suggests so.’

  ‘Come, Monsignore!’ encouraged Don Marcellino. ‘We can be frank among ourselves. The fo
reigners have ears only for the mitred colonel!’ Nodding at Mérode whose voice thrummed rowdily:

  ‘We are more humane than your English dean who suggested that the poor eat their children.’

  ‘But was it the cardinal,’ the lady wondered, ‘who enticed Monseigneur’s Crusaders into a trap?’

  ‘That was …’ The young milord’s French was deserting him. ‘A joke!’

  ‘They say the French Ambassador swore to the cardinal that General Goyon would be bringing 10,000 French troops as reinforcements! So the cardinal passed this on to the Crusaders.’

  ‘A joke?’ Mérode affected an appalled amazement.

  Nicola warmed to him, then remembered that he shouldn’t.

  ‘Irony, you know.’ The Englishman stammered. ‘M-m-meant to be taken the other way round.’

  ‘You mean,’ Mérode sounded solicitous, ‘that they should stop eating their children?’

  ‘Then no reinforcements came.’

  ‘If it was a trap, who,’ asked Don Marcellino, ‘set it? Napoleon to discredit the Orleanists? Or Antonelli to discredit Mérode? Do we know that the French Ambassador made such a promise?’

  ‘Mérode thought so.’ The lady’s whisper hissed like silk. ‘I heard that he accused him to his face of being the faithful lackey of a lying master and that the Crusaders’ General seized Antonelli by the throat and called him a traitor!’

  Don Marcellino looked right and left. ‘Also,’ he lowered his voice, ‘that His Holiness’s indignation triggered a,’ he mouthed silently: ‘fit. The battles fought in Rome were as fierce as the one at Castelfidardo!’

  ‘Where,’ intoned the lady, ‘the flower of Royalist France was cut down! Have you seen the names of the fallen? It’s like a list of those attending a levee of Louis XIV!’ She closed her eyes, perhaps to savour a vision of the Sun King receiving his shirt from some gentleman whose name knelled for the death of a descendant at Castelfidardo. ‘Old France,’ she opened them, ‘has paid its tribute … I think something’s happening.’ Breaking off, her voice grew brisk. ‘A young woman appears to have been taken ill!’