Addressed to whom? To all. To all the Minority bishops. This frivolous old city hated to be stirred up and would no doubt sing a gleeful Te Deum on seeing the back of De Pavone Lupus and his troublesome friends!
The jibe with its dig at his bastardy carried an implication that a bar sinister cut through his loyalties – which was quite untrue! For why in the first place had he entered the Church? He had been following his heart! And it had led him to Christ, to the priesthood and to Pius IX! Love-child of a young cavalry lieutenant who had not acknowledged him – although relatives did help his career – the young Dupanloup had felt so needy for affection that charm became second nature and very soon – the quip was Renan’s – made him into ‘the most fashionable priest in Paris’, with three queens sitting in at his catechism class at the Madeleine. He did like to be liked. Even as a teacher, he appealed to pupils’ feelings and the method worked well for him. But it was not worldliness which ruled him. He was not divided. No. He was loyalty itself – and just now he was loyalty spurned.
Smiles. Melancholy embraces. Goodbye for now. See you when the Council reconvenes! Deo volente. Monsignor Haynald was travelling too. Did he think less of Dupanloup because he could not fling his non placet in the pontiff’s face? Did Darboy? Dupanloup was glad they didn’t know of a plea which he had sent secretly to Pius after the trial ballot. ‘Mad!’ had been Pius’s reaction, which a third party promptly reported back. ‘Either he’s mad or he thinks I am!’ And perhaps the Bishop of Orléans had indeed lacked sober sense. But how could a man of faith and feeling always gauge the possible? What he had done was to make a proposal and a promise never, if the pontiff were to adopt it, to reveal that it had been his. It was that Pius, now that he had won his point, should defer the definition until passions had cooled. Such sublime magnanimity would, urged the bishop, ‘astound the world and excite universal gratitude’. Writing these words, his eyes had moistened. It was his last filial cry and elicited no response, because, he now saw, the idea was too French. He had appealed to Pius as to a character in a Cornelian tragedy exquisitely attuned to his own heroic virtue. La gloire! Honour! But neither Rome nor Pius could conceive of such a thing. Noblesse oblige struck them as vapouring vanity. Prideful! A showy fanfaronade if not indeed a sin!
Anxiously, Félix Dupanloup examined his conscience. Could Renan have been right? Had he been affected by the fashionable world to the point of confusing delicacy with morals? Grown feminine? Lost the virile resolution needed in a fight?
*
Georges Darboy too had heard the hiss. He made a moue.
He wished Haynald’s plan had been carried but, as things stood, what mattered was solidarity. In a month the Council would reconvene. Meanwhile the fifty-five signatories to the letter must try to stand firm while being prepared for desertions. Even Christ in His agony had found His disciples asleep.
Our letter would no doubt end in the Vatican archives bearing, unlike Veronica’s veil, no sign of the anguish which had gone into it. It ran:
Most Holy father,
In the General Congregation held on the 13th inst. we voted on the schema of the first Dogmatic Constitution concerning the Church of Christ.
Your Holiness is aware that 88 Fathers, urged by conscience and moved by love of Holy Church, voted non placet; 62 placet iuxta modum; finally about 76 were absent and did not vote. Others had returned to their dioceses … Thus our votes are known to Your Holiness and manifest to the whole world …
Nothing has happened since to change our opinion … We therefore declare that we renew and confirm the votes already given.
Confirming our votes therefore in the present document, we have decided to be absent from the Public Session on the 18th inst. For the filial piety and reverence which very recently brought our representatives to the feet of your Holiness do not allow us in a cause so closely concerning Your Holiness to say non placet openly and in the face of the Father …
We return, therefore, without delay to our flocks … Meanwhile … we are Your Holiness’s most devoted and obedient sons.
This letter was to be handed to the Secretary of the Council before tomorrow’s Session.
Monseigneur Darboy was returning to his flock with foreboding. He, more directly than any other bishop, had sought help from his government and saw its refusal as ominous. Why had it been so loath to interfere? A Christian king would have been less pusillanimous. Sixteenth-century ones had done their damnedest to interfere at Trent. The Empire was clearly in a shaky state and ‘Napoleon the Small’ seemed to be falling back on that great cure for domestic discontent: the quest for glory on foreign battlefields. His failure to find it in Mexico had, providentially, been far away. Next time the risks would be closer to home.
As the train pulled out, the Archbishop looked for Amandi’s Coadjutor, but didn’t seem him. A pity. The young Monseigneur was one of the few Italian bishops with any pluck. Darboy had wanted to assure him that the fight was still on, despite today’s setback, and that he must not despair of our getting justice for poor Amandi. Terrible tragedies had happened as a result of this Council. Old, loyal bishops had seen their faith rocked and their hearts broken. Good men had been turned into cynics. We owed it to them to continue the struggle. Hailing a mutual acquaintance, he asked him to bring the Coadjutor a one-word message: ‘Coraggio!’
*
Nicola’s audience with the Pope was stormy. Later, he supposed he must have been more affected than he knew by a dose of medicine taken to bring his fever down.
His Holiness wanted his placet at tomorrow’s Solemn Session. ‘You, Monsignore, are one of our own bishops from whom we expect more loyalty than has been forthcoming from some foreign ones.’
Though stern, he spoke with what seemed to be genuine feeling about the loss of poor Amandi. He was hard to resist. His confidence was electric, his gestures potent. He smiled with his whole face and his lower lip jutted as though a bee had stung it. Nicola thought, I don’t look like him. Can there be anything to Prospero’s story? It was as if there were two Piuses: the one here in front of him and the unlikely, shaming one who might be his father. He could not deal with both at the same time.
‘He and I were friends long before you were born,’ said this Pius of Amandi. ‘His was a noble soul! How sad all these divisions are. I am glad you are loyal to his memory, Monsignore. It speaks well of you.’ And the old pontiff shook friendly jowls and crinkled his eyes with such an air of understanding that the bishop felt softened and was thinking how hard it must have been for Amandi to defy old allegiances when it was borne in on him that he was being asked for Giraud’s retraction. Monsieur Louis Veuillot wanted it, and he was a man, said His Holiness, whom he would not hesitate to defend against a bishop. Indeed, he had defended him in the past against their Lordships Dupanloup and Sibour – Darboy’s predecessor in the See of Paris who had since then, poor man, been senselessly murdered by a mad priest. Such things happened nowadays, even within our own ranks! That was why a lay champion like Veuillot was worth his weight in gold. ‘Gold, Monsignore! He’s a brave soldier for Rome and Rome will stand by him. There are those who say that priests in France are refusing to become bishops because they fear he will have more power in their dioceses than they. I say it’s just as well such priests do not become bishops. We have too many already who dislike bowing to our authority.’
Nicola saw that the moment was unpropitious. Time, however, was short and he was unlikely to have another chance to make his request that the cardinal’s murder should be investiga …
‘Monsignore!’ A gesture cut off the topic at such speed that His Holiness could hardly have been taken by suprise. Indeed, it now turned out that Monsiegneur Randi had told him of Nicola’s delusions. ‘Not another word! Have you got Giraud’s paper?’
The bishop said he did not. The Pope said he should get it. The bishop said it had left the city because it would be needed to establish the truth. If Monseigneur Randi would only open an inquiry …
‘Monsignore! Monsignore!’ Mastai’s headshake was ponderous but had an edge of humour to it, and Nicola saw quite suddenly that he was watching a performance so practised as to be second nature – but not nature itself. No, the play of whimsical mouth, compelling gaze, stern then complicitous grimace, was too well orchestrated to be spontaneous. Pius, Nicola saw, was an artist who evoked feeling but delivered none – which, after all, was his role. He was a Vicar. His dimension was mythic not domestic. He was nobody’s father and his warmth of manner was a mere portent. All this was orthodox and if Nicola felt a sudden chill, well, he had malaria and could blame neither it nor his sense of desolation on Mastai. From a depth of himself opened by stress and fever, there welled up an intuition. Pius, after twenty-four years as pontiff, was a performer only. There was no humanity left in him.
If this was fever, Nicola prayed for more of it. Closing his eyes, he reflected that if he had managed to contact the departing Darboy – probably now at the station – he would have taken back the retraction from him and might now surrender it to Pius. As it was, he was being backed into rebellion.
‘Monsignore!’ The silvery voice had steel in it. ‘Let me remind you that four days ago you and your brother bishops unanimously accepted the canon on the Papal Primacy decreeing that the Roman Pontiff has supreme jurisdiction not only in things pertaining to faith and morals but also in those pertaining to discipline and the government of the Church. How then can you refuse to give me the retraction?’
The bishop’s head swam. He tightened his fists to keep from swooning. He was still on his knees, since the pontiff had not given him permission to get off them and, despite the risk of swooning, Nicola was determined not to ask for it. Yet his fever was gaining on him. Even the angle at which he had to keep his head was painful. And now, as he stared up at the fat, white shape above him he saw it levitate.
‘Well,’ asked the unsteady figure. ‘Well, Monsignore?’
Later, it would seem to the bishop that he at this point uttered a somnambulist’s warning to the fracturing whiteness. It was against deceptions like those now infesting his own head. Moths! Snow flurries! Paracletes!
‘They’re dangerous,’ he told the skirted knees which were opening like those of a woman giving birth. Everyone, he thought, sees a different Pius – the saint, the martyr, the perturbator ecclesiae. But the knees menaced him like the white, age-smoothed heads of marble lions which flank church doors in towns like Imola. Changing back into knees, they were those of a woman in labour under a stretched sheet, flanking the cavity where doctors grope to deliver a child. Lion-kneed, the woman groaned about the ills of Mother Church and menaced Nicola with arrest if he did not hand over the paper.
Cunning in his delirium, the bishop said that in that case the paper would be printed in the French, English and Italian press.
‘Ah, so the deputy has it! Martelli! You’re a traitor, then, Monsignore! A traitor and a turncoat! A Judas!’
‘I’ve been told that I’m the son of one!’ was what he seemed to say next, before succumbing to a fit of malarial shaking. ‘T-t-t-turncoat!’ he remembered crying through teeth which chattered like castanets before being seized by a palsy so disabling that the audience had to be terminated.
*
On 18 July, the Council proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope. On 19 July, France declared war on Prussia and, on 19 August, withdrew her garrison from Rome.
*
‘You were raving!’ Prospero told Nicola when he came to visit him in the country, where he was convalescing. ‘Delirious! Thank God this became obvious at the end! You’re lucky!’
‘What?’
Yes, said Prospero, because this furnished grounds for forgiveness. ‘After all, you were sick, full of some drug and melancholy-mad over poor Amandi’s demise. If you make your act of submission, declare your adhesion to the Constitution Pastor Aeternus, obtain and give up Maximin Giraud’s paper and …’
‘And what?’
‘Apologise. It seems you were rather offensive in a mad way.’
‘Unfilial?’
‘Nicola, I want you to forget our conversation about … you know what I mean.’ Prospero wiped sweat from his neck and forehead. He had driven a long way in unpleasant heat to make this visit.
‘Tell me about the Solemn Session.’
Prospero was only too pleased to do so. None of the Minority had attended except for two rather obscure men, a Sicilian and an American, who, being unaware of the agreed strategy, had turned up and said non placet.
‘Brave men!’
‘No. Strays! They seem to have done it by mistake, or so they say now. Anyway, they submitted on the spot, crying Modo credo. They’ve shown the way all must go.’
‘Hush. Don’t gloat! Just describe what happened.’
The event had taken on the colours of legend. There had been a storm, a bizarre, blazing electric one which each side had interpreted as the voice of heaven signalling its anathema or – according to preference – sanction.
Prospero admitted that there was a divergence over detail. Reports differed as to whether a ray of light had pierced the darkness and lit the Pope’s forehead just as he pronounced the definition. Prospero had not himself seen this. Conversely, had a windowpane shattered and fallen ominously near Mastai’s head? In all the noise, it would have been easy to miss. All agreed that it had been hard to hear the placets over the pealing thunder and that the crowd – smaller far than at the opening ceremony – had been distracted by the lightning darting about the baldacchino and flashing in at every window, down through the dome and around every cupola. ‘In a way it added to the solemnity.’
‘Lucifer’s last signal?’
‘Who can say? The storm was at its height when the result of the voting was brought to His Holiness, and it was so dark that a taper had to be placed beside him as he read and pronounced the definition: a light shining in the darkness that the darkness did not comprehend! Thunder and lightning were still raging. Then the Te Deum was sung, the congregation fell to their knees and he blessed them in that thrilling voice of his. It was deeply moving.’
‘So his labour bore fruit. A new infallible self!’
Prospero ignored this. ‘Meanwhile,’ he said, ‘a skeleton Council goes on. We’ve held two meetings. Both very sober. There are 120 of us left. We’ve gone back to the agenda which was put aside to make way for …’
‘The question.’
‘Yes.’
‘Darboy reminded me that one of that word’s meanings is “torture”.’
Prospero did not demur. He was weary after his journey to this remote house where Nicola was keeping out of the way. Their host – Flavio – was doing much the same, for the collapse of Langrand-Dumonceau’s empire was sending tremors through the world of the fashionable and the well-born. Pillars of old Europe had been shaken, as case after case dragged through the Belgian courts, revealing that the fallen Midas’s collaborators – like the horses in his stables, most were thoroughbreds – must either have been cretinously ignorant of his fraudulent practices or have culpably connived. Indeed, said those who chose to think them cretins, he could as well have harnessed the blue bloods to his carriages and seated the horses in his boardrooms.
Slanderous charges in La Cote Libre de la Bourse de Bruxelles had turned out not to be slanderous at all, and Belgium’s Royal Attorney and Attorney General had been dismissed for failure to recognise this, while its Prime Minister, a Langrand associate, was being challenged to resign.
Rome was a Limbo.
The French troops would not be back, for Prussia, contrary to predictions, was winning its war against France. Certitudes were collapsing. Yet here was Prospero demanding Nicola’s submission to the doctrine of papal infallibility! Should he give it as a kindness to a crazed old man? He had neither the charity nor the cynicism.
Flavio admitted that the Belgian Courts were likely to charge him with embezzling sums which Langrand’s books showed as ha
ving been paid to him. The truth was that they had been spent here in Rome. On bribes to churchmen – but how prove this?
‘They don’t give receipts.’
He also revealed that Victor Emmanuel had been ready to dismiss his ministers and govern by decree. If he had gone through with this – a royal coup d’état – his Finance Minister designate was to have accepted Langrand’s plan to buy the Church property in Italy. The bribed churchmen would have secured Roman agreement and everyone would have been rich. The money Langrand and Flavio were being acused of taking would have multiplied, the ruined investors would be counting their dividends, and the Church would have its fourteen hundred million francs! ‘It was all a matter of faith. I told you at the time. It was like St Peter walking on water! But Peter lost his nerve. And so, therefore, did the king!’ Flavio kept repeating this in differing moods – drunk, sober, despairing, marvelling. Faith! Why had nobody had it?
‘And what about truth?’ asked Nicola on hearing this speech for perhaps the twentieth time.
‘There’s no such thing!’ roared the duke. ‘It’s a discredited Voltairean notion! Reality is shifting, multiple and not to be relied on, yet Langrand and I are being crucified in its name. By Liberals. Liberals make a fetish of it because they don’t understand the world. You’ll see and so will they. Give them power for a bit and they’ll begin to understand.’
Prospero said much the same thing. Now, he argued, was not the time for points of doctrine but for loyalty to the faith which could move mountains and stop armies! His Holiness was threatened by the Garibaldini who, now that the French were gone, could be expected at any moment. He needed the comfort of our support. Was Nicola going to give it? If he was, he should write his act of submission and let Prospero take it back to Rome.
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