The Judas Cloth

by Julia O'Faolain

  There was no mention of Giraud’s retraction. Nicola, who had been unable to request it while Darboy was besieged in Paris, decided to do so now. This, however, was delicate in the light of its controversial nature and Darboy’s mood. He was pondering how best to couch his request when he received the following letter:

  Monsignore,

  I am writing on behalf of our unhappy archbishop in the hope that his Roman friends may be able to help him.

  The rabble has seized Paris and the Government withdrawn to Versailles. The victorious Prussians, having signed an armistice, are letting us destroy each other and the rabble leaders – they style themselves ‘the Commune’ – having taken Monseigneur and several other priests hostage, threaten to shoot them unless they can exchange them for a prisoner held by the Government, a certain Auguste Blanqui.

  Adolph Thiers, Head of the Executive of the French Republic, appears reluctant to make the exchange. This baffles us and we are urging foreign diplomatists and other persons of rank and influence to intervene while Monsieur Thiers is parleying with the archbishop’s envoy and there is still hope. I appeal to you most urgently, Monsignore, to bring to bear any influence you can.

  The situation is grave and the mob enfevered. Having lost a war and endured the privations of a four-month investment by the Prussians, they want scapegoats. Unsurprisingly their rage has turned against their old souffre douleur, the Church. Communard newspapers are filled with ravings about monks found storing gunpowder, using bullets for rosary beads, etc.

  Monsieur Thiers’ motives are hard to fathom but we have indications that the archbishop could have fallen victim to ultramontane spite, which an appeal by the Holy Father could certainly disarm.

  I have the honour, Monsignore, to express my deepest and most devoted respects, etc.

  Nicola took this to Prospero. ‘Your heart,’ he hoped, ‘will tell you what to do. If it does not, let me implore you to help. Unlike you, I have no influence here. Besides, I am going to France.’

  Prospero was horrified. France? Was Nicola insane? What about loyalty at this time of trial? During the Pope’s Calvary …

  ‘Ah,’ said Nicola, ‘you choose to see him as Christ. But what if one saw him as Caiaphas?’

  ‘Stop!’ Prospero, picking up a poker, began to bang it against his coal scuttle.

  ‘The Roman mode of refutation!’ roared Nicola, trying to be heard above the din.

  ‘What?’ Prospero had deafened himself.

  ‘You’ve just demonstrated it.’ He stood up. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘No! Listen! Unless and until you give in your letter of consent, I shall not help Darboy, who is reaping what he sowed. He consorted with Liberals and is now in the hands of the Reds.’

  ‘Are you offering me a bargain? Good! Write the letter and I’ll sign it. But you must promise not to submit it until Pius has made an appeal on Darboy’s behalf or Darboy has been released.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Prospero sat down, penned a few lines, dried them, and handed the paper to Nicola who read: ‘Ego profiteor pure et sempliciter toto corde et anima adhaerere definitionis dogmaticis a Sanctitate tua prolatis die 18 juli habita.’ He signed.

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ said Prospero. ‘I hope I am in your prayers as often as you are in mine. As for the paper which I suspect you of hoping to recover from Darboy, it has no doubt been burned. The nuncio wrote that Darboy prudently burned a lot of papers connected with the Council during the Prussian siege of Paris.’

  Nicola told him that he was thinking more of Darboy than of the paper. The living took precedence over the dead.

  *

  A week later he was in the drawing room of his friend the Abbé Delisle. The room, fragrant with the Sicilian blood oranges which he had brought as a gift, hummed like an apiary and showed signs that the unwary risked being stung.

  A young woman cried, ‘It’s despicable!’

  She was his host’s sister or perhaps cousin. Nicola had not got this clear, for sisters, aunts, nieces and even a sprinkling of pious uncles had come in throngs to hear his news of Rome.

  ‘I couldn’t keep them away!’ The abbé clasped his friend’s hands and smiled in rueful amusement, for the guests, already oblivious of Rome, were embroiled in tussles of their own. ‘Just as well,’ he whispered, ‘they’re not of our way of thinking at all!’

  All the guests had the same high colouring as their host, with bright blue eyes, hair like dimmed brass, and the forthright manner which had drawn Nicola to him when they met last year in Rome.

  ‘There are Judases among the clergy!’ cried the young woman.

  ‘There may be an explanation!’

  ‘There is: he’s saving his neck!’ She arched her own superbly slim-stemmed one, as though defying the guillotine. Her coiled hair flamed and Nicola thought of the Maid of Orléans. There was a combustive spark in her and Orléans was where they were, in the diocese of Monseigneur Dupanloup who, though a Liberal Catholic, was politically a royalist.

  Getting here had been slow. The railways were disrupted by the recent war and progress through a wrecked but buoyant landscape – spring greenery was pushing through twisted girders – had made the traveller feel like a man doing the Stations of the Cross. All along the way he had seen maimed men and convoys of returning prisoners, gutted buildings and neglected fields. Yet the war’s last act might be still to come and its victim could, said the abbé’s guests, be Monseigneur Darboy whose Vicar-General, the Abbé Lagarde, had let him down and abandoned him in prison, apparently – but could this be true? – to save his own skin. Lagarde, a priest and the son of a baron, was a man whose word should have been his bond – and yet …

  The Vicar-General, Delisle explained, had been released from the Paris prison, where he had been held with the archbishop, so that he might go to Versailles to negotiate an exchange of hostages with the Government. On leaving, he had promised to return at once, but two weeks had now passed without a word from him.

  ‘And the rabble are making capital out of it! Listen.’ The young woman took a newspaper from her reticule. ‘This is one of their papers, The Cry of the People.’ She read: “a It is our duty to put on record the fact that the French clergy in the persons of Monseigneur Darboy and his Vicar-General has betrayed an oath sworn on the archbishop’s head. Let Paris judge on which side lie moderation, honour and justice and which must take responsibility for the outcome.”’ She dropped the declamatory tone in which she had been reading. ‘He’s let us all down.’

  Watching a blush creep up her face, Nicola guessed that she was embarrassed at having lent her histrionic talents to the Commune’s rhetoric. Poor Maid of Orléans, he thought. Her voices are garbled.

  She had, however, found a more congenial topic. It seemed that a woman she knew had been slipping in and out of Paris, carrying letters from loyal priests to the Vicar-General in Versailles, pleading with him to keep his word and return.

  Her listeners marvelled. A woman courier! How did she manage? The Paris stations were guarded and there was no longer a direct service to Versailles. And wasn’t the Commune shooting anyone suspected of having contacts with that town?

  ‘I naturally can’t tell you how she does it – only that last time she saw the abbé, she flung herself at his feet, held up her crucifix and conjured him to return to his archbishop.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Mumbled lamely about things he could not disclose.’

  ‘How shameful – and how splendid of her!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the Maid of Orléans and gave Nicola her Communard paper as a memento of the trials of France. He wondered could the woman courier be herself?

  When the guests had gone, he and Delisle talked more easily.

  ‘Might they really shoot Monseigneur Darboy?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the abbé. ‘Their hatred is visceral. They hate the Army because it lost the war and the Church because it abetted the Empire’s twenty years of oppression – which it did. I was o
n eggs just now because to say so can start a war in one’s own drawing room. People like my cousin, you see, think the Church was right.’

  ‘The Maid of Orléans?’

  ‘A good name for her. Only she would burn others rather than herself and now those others have Darboy in their hands. Forgive me if I tell you something distasteful, but Paris is not Rome and you should know how battles there are fought. What started the present turmoil was a squabble over cannons which the mob did not want turned over to the Prussians, despite the armistice. Well, it seized them and the French troops sent to get them disobeyed their general’s order to fire. Chaos broke out. Two generals were shot and their heads beaten to a pulp, whereupon two women stepped from the crowd, squatted over their bodies, and urinated on them. I heard this from an eyewitness – an officer who was lucky to get away alive. That’s to tell you the sort of rage which has been unstoppered. It is old and sour and goes back to the Revolution of eighty-nine and the revenge taken later on the revolutionaries. Its targets are ourselves and the Army: couvent et caserne. The Reds are ritualists. Why do you think they arrested Monseigneur?’

  ‘To treat him as they did the generals? Then why offer to exchange him for this man What’s-his-name?’

  ‘Blanqui. Auguste Blanqui. Because that too would be a ritual, an exchange of the first priest of Paris for the man whose newspaper bore the slogan “War to the supernatural”. Rigault, the Procureur, says he would happily strangle the last priest with the guts of the last king. It is as well to know these things.’

  Nicola asked whether Delisle knew of conservative hatred for Darboy.

  ‘Well,’ said the abbé, ‘Monseigneur is the devout, honourable, and ambitious son of a village grocer: a vexing mixture for the better born who have been obliged to play second fiddle to him. They too might relish his downfall.’

  ‘But he’s in the hands of the Left!’

  ‘And it would be so easy to leave him there! There need be no plot. A climate of opinion is created and the thing goes from there. How?’ Delisle shrugged. ‘By reminding the faithful that he is in bad odour with the Pope and that, now that the Empire is gone, we need a less imperial archbishop. By chatter from people like the blind, blue-blooded Monseigneur de Ségur who has been spreading a story about the Emperor’s having had a plan to found a schismatic French Church with Darboy at its head. It’s slander, but mud sticks because Ségur was known to be Mastai’s spy and the uncharitable say mat Darboy slapped him when his tittletattle to Pius got back to him. According to some reports, the spy then slid to his knees and turned the other cheek! Don’t laugh, Monsignore. This is all deadly serious, because those who peddle such tales do so as part of a scheme to bring back the Bourbons so that they, in turn, may restore the Temporal Power. Wheels within wheels! All things work together for the greater glory of the Comte de Chambord, known to Legitimists as Henri V. The connection escapes you? Wait. You should know that royalist bishops are circulating petitions to our new National Assembly, begging it to intervene on behalf of the Pope. Intervene how? With our ruined armies? While the Prussians are still in France? They know it can’t be done but deceive their flocks so as to drum up support for Chambord who says that he, if restored, would do it. This manoeuvre is known as the Union of the Throne and the Altar! Does it not strike you that its supporters might prefer a new archbishop? Of course they would! Darboy always irked them, but he became intolerable the day he rallied to our new Republic and had hymns sung for it in the churches of his diocese. It was the patriotic thing to do since we were at war, but the Domine salvam fac Republican stuck in monarchist gullets. It is hard though – in the ordinary way – to replace an archbishop!’

  The abbé smiled mournfully. ‘Do you think me fanciful? Look.’ Rummaging in a drawer he took out a parcel tied with white ribbon. It contained two portraits. One was of Pius IX looking out through the bars of a prison. The other was of the Comte de Chambord. ‘My cousin says it is the duty of every loyal priest to display these, and, as you see, she has provided me with them. A test? Very likely! Our so-called Government of National Unity is menaced from the Right as well as the Left and Monsieur Thiers will have to work hard to keep a balance. Darboy is a nuisance. Thiers claims that his refusal to exchange hostages is based on principle – one must not encourage hostage-taking, etc. – but for a different archbishop more might have been done. Not that Thiers need plot, you understand. His nickname is Foutriquet or Little Squirt. Little squirts do not plan crimes. They let them happen.’

  ‘I mink I shall go to Versailles.’

  ‘Well, the nuncio is there and so are Thiers and Lagarde. I can give you a letter to help you find lodgings. Without help you won’t get a room. There are suddenly 40,000 extra people in a town of 250,000. I, however, have a cousin …’

  ‘You are well supplied with them.’

  ‘They have their good points.’

  *

  At breakfast the abbé was glum with guilt over his lack of charity the night before.

  ‘In school,’ Nicola told him, ‘the Jesuits told us it was all right to spy for God – so why not gossip for Him? What you told me was useful. I think they might absolve you.’

  ‘We may have misjudged them.’ The abbé, still in an atoning mood, had heard that the Jesuits in Communard gaols were being edifyingly heroic. A man he knew had gone to the Dépôt on the night of the great arrest – 4th April – and, passing a cell door, heard the rallying words ‘“Ibant gaudentes!” The martyrs went to their fate with a joy we may now hope to share!’ It was Father Olivaint, the Jesuit Superior, trying to hearten those around him.

  Fastidiously the abbé removed a cooling skin from his bowl of café au lait. ‘I suppose,’ he brooded, ‘that if Jesuit zeal is now for sacrificing themselves rather than others, they may indeed find joy in prison!’ With distaste, he considered then ate the dripping spoonful.

  ‘It could be a legend!’ said the cynical Nicola.

  The abbé looked depressed. ‘Maybe,’ he wondered, ‘a spell in prison would do us all good? Not that it helped poor Lagarde!’

  Nicola asked what they should think of him and Delisle said his task might be impossible because the Communard press was provoking Thiers so as to scupper negotiations. ‘You should see what they print! Accusations that Blanqui is being tortured and the like.’

  ‘But why start negotiations then undermine them?’

  ‘They’re divided! When Paris falls, as it must, the moderates inside it will hope to save their necks while the rest will try to force them to fight on. To do that they must make surrender unthinkable. Kill Darboy and perhaps the Jesuits too.’

  There was a silence. ‘Do you suppose,’ Nicola wondered, ‘bigots make better martyrs?’

  For moments, the abbé wore the look of a tempted man. Then he succumbed. ‘Who,’ he blurted, ‘can say that martyrdom does good? It rouses a revengeful spirit and what good is that unless we, like inquisitors, make war on our own people?’ He wriggled as though his skin irked him. Peace was his ideal, and those threatening it made him bellicose. There were, he argued, better sacrifices. Had not Lacordaire argued that to become a priest was one in itself? ‘He said that any man who can see through the aching envelope which cramps us to the undying image of God contributes to the blood spilled for salvation. “Tu es sacerdos in aeternum”! That’s not about blood-letting! As you and I agreed in Rome, my dear Monsignore, it is better to reconcile than to fight!’ Delisle’s smile celebrated a precarious armistice with himself.

  Nicola’s experiences were leading him the other way. He remarked evasively: ‘You have it by heart!’

  The abbé’s face was alight. ‘For my generation, Lacordaire was the great influence. His message was to bring France back to the faith in ways she could accept, with tact and patriotism. He was the sort of man who makes this Pope see red: a Liberal Catholic like my bishop, Monseigneur Dupanloup, thanks to whose protection I am free to speak to you as I do. For now, a bishop in his own diocese is still st
rong.’

  ‘Except for Darboy.’

  The abbé sighed.

  *

  The Abbé Lagarde was a youngish man with a surge of black hair. Painted by Murillo, his might have been the features of a saint – or have had, in a livelier mood, the appeal of those youths in Baroque paintings who hold a piece of fruit between their lips. Today they looked pent and guarded, as though the Vicar-General were censoring his breath, and a grey smudging of the skin – poor health? Blunt razor? – had the dimming effect of a mask.

  Nicola asked what hope he had of obtaining Giraud’s retraction. It was a neutral question unlikely to catch the abbé on the raw.

  Lagarde told him that the archbishop’s papers had been seized by the Communards. ‘Who knows why? Perhaps they are constructing a gospel acccording to themselves? That could be, for the last letter I received from Monseigneur was in duplicate. Odd, don’t you think, that they should make him write two? My guess’ said the abbé, ‘is that one copy had been intended for the press which propagates a gospel in which I am publicly dishonoured. Even Monseigneur must believe this version since, as my letters to him are intercepted, I dare not give him my reasons for lingering here. Forgive me. This is a long answer to your question.’