Nicola bowed and left. What else was there to say? As he went out, he saw a young woman waiting, and wondered whether she was the courier, come again to beg the abbé to stop being Judas.
*
His next call was on the nuncio, Monsignor Chigi.
‘Welcome back!’ cried His Excellency festively, but meant to the fold rather than to France. He had a copy of the latest Osservatore Romano containing a notice of Nicola’s assent to the dogma. The bishop was the very last Italian to submit, said the nuncio, and to celebrate invited him to dinner this evening. We could talk then. Unfortunately, just now … Smiling with affable regret, Chigi sighed at the press of business with which he had to cope. Nicola left.
Had Pius made an appeal for Darboy? By the terms of Nicola’s agreement with Prospero, the news in the Osservatore meant that the Pope must have done so. Else Prospero would surely not have submitted Nicola’s letter of consent. Hoping to hearten the unfortunate Lagarde, Nicola returned to tell him this.
To his surprise, the abbé seemed already heartened. The bishop must have brought him luck. He had had news from Paris and, without wishing to divulge too much, could reveal that a plan – not the one involving Monsieur Thiers, but a parallel backstairs effort – was on the point of success. ‘We must pray, Monsignore! We must knock on all doors.’
Nicola told his own news then, and the two celebrated modestly, as a footman brought in a decanter and a plate of petits fours with the compliments of the abbé’s host, a Monsieur Perrot, who was, said the abbé, the deputy for l’Oise.
They discovered that they had mutual acquaintances and this so disarmed Lagarde that he began to tell of the obstacles encountered here in Versailles, where the Government was as distrustful of the hostages as of their captors. ‘Monsieur Thiers,’ he revealed, ‘says that Monseigneur is now a blind instrument of the Commune!’
‘Because he asked to be exchanged?’
‘Because he acknowledges in his letters that the Communards have grievances. Unfortunately, he mentioned “barbaric acts” committed by our troops. Monsieur Thiers was indignant. Monseigneur could not have foreseen that passions here would be so inflamed and his charity seen as, well, frankly, cowardice. His old reputation as a friend of free-thinkers counts against him too. Indeed, I am as worried for his honour as his life …’ Wearily, the abbé batted a hand across his eyes. ‘You find me,’ he confessed, ‘in a weak moment. Hope softens me. Warmth after cold is treacherous. I must not burden you with dangerous knowledge.’
*
That evening at the nuncio’s residence the first person Nicola saw was Amandi’s old major-domo, Gianni, who was wearing Monsignor Chigi’s livery and wept at the sight of him. Seeing Nicola also begin to give way, he drew him into a small room. Gianni was motherly. Have a little cry, he recommended. We can stay here a while – unless Monsignore would rather be alone?
‘No, no!’ Nicola felt overcome. Famulus was a servant, after all, and it was painful to remember how Cardinal Amandi’s familia had broken up.
Gianni produced a glass of something consoling.
‘Do you want me greeting His Excellency with brandy on my breath?’
‘Thought of that, didn’t I?’ Proffering a peppermint fondant, Gianni dropped his voice. ‘I have information which will interest your lordship.’
Nicola was amused. ‘So you keep up your old ways! Isn’t it harder to keep informed here, Gianni?’
Of course it was, whispered Gianni. Of course! Servants were worked harder, so how could they find time to swop information? It was astonishing how hard the French worked, though, lately, you could see the need for it, what with having to clean up after the Prussian pigs, if calling them that wasn’t an insult to the pig, which was one of God’s creatures and clean when you gave him a chance to be – unlike Prussians. They were dirty animals and so was their King Emperor who – Gianni had this from the footman who’d had to deal with the outcome
– had shat in a window bay, si proprio cacato!, when he’d billeted himself on the Archbishop of Rheims, then wiped his bum on the curtains! So the French had been kept busy cleaning the stain on their honour, not to speak of their furnishings. They’d even cleaned the Paris streets after the Prussian victory march. With lye! Not but that they’d have to be washed in blood one day too. Redeemed, said Gianni, lapsing into a vocabulary redolent of his employers’ calling. But to come back to French servants. Gianni was training a few likely fellows to pick up information. That was how he knew that Monsignore had visited the Abbé Lagarde twice today – ‘Eh, Monsignore! Am I well informed?’ – which meant that Gianni’s tidbit must be of interest It came from the Préfecture where Monsieur l’Abbé and Monsieur Thiers used to hold talks. No more, though! Monsieur Thiers had broken them off a week ago. Lowering his voice further, Gianni whispered that since then the abbé had stayed here for one reason only: to fool the Communards who, if they knew the talks were stopped and they weren’t going to get their man Blanko, would shoot the archbishop! Pan! Gianni laid a finger next to his nose and tapped it. ‘You’d better go into the drawing room, now, Monsignore.’
*
Nicola was dismayed to find Louis Veuillot among the nuncio’s guests. The journalist, however, behaved as though they were fast friends and drew him into an exchange with an Englishman who, having come to distribute food donated by the population of London, was one of the few people able to go freely in and out of Paris. ‘Mr Blount is on good terms with the Communenx!’ sneered Veuillot.
The Englishman retorted that, whatever their practice, some of the Communards’ principles were admirable. Veuillot asked if it was true that Cluseret, their War Minister, had been General in Chief of the Fenians in England. Blount hadn’t heard this.
‘Scum!’ said Veuillot.
At dinner, Nicola sat next to a frilly Polish lady who confided that there was a crusade among her countrymen to save the archbishop. ‘Our gentlemen fight on both sides, so we have access to General Cluseret through Jaroslaw Dombrowski, the Commandant of Paris. Cluseret,’ she lowered her voice, ‘likes money!’
‘Surely, Madame, we should not talk of such things?’
The lady looked surprised. ‘But we are among ourselves!’
He remarked that there were servants in the room.
‘Servants!’ Her imagination leapfrogged past his. ‘French Jacobins? In the pay of the Commune? Are we safe?’
He assured her that servants were rarely revolutionaries. But the lady kept looking over her shoulder and when a decanter slid past it, so forgot her breeding as to knock it away. The wine made a stain in the damask and the subsequent mopping brought a lull in which Veuillot could be heard defending his decision to reprint attacks made by Communard papers on the Abbé Lagarde.
These, objected the Englishman, must be painful to the abbé.
‘That,’ said Veuillot, ‘is our hope!’
Observing the polemicist with interest, Nicola saw that his appearance was at odds with his bellicosity. His flesh was slack and his snub features had an air of bonhomie. The Englishman must have spoken in Lagarde’s defence, for Veuillot cried that to show mercy to the sinful was to encourage sin.
‘This cannot be sound doctrine?’ Blount appealed to Chigi who admitted that zeal sometimes carried Monsieur Veuillot too far.
‘Which,’ the nuncio smiled drolly, ‘allows us to intervene on the side of clemency and win hearts. Some say it’s a Romish plot.’
Nicola asked whether Lagarde might not be keeping his own counsel for tactical reasons.
Veuillot fixed him with an eye untroubled by nuance. It was like a dog’s eye. Did the bishop think, he asked, that the abbé was following up some clandestine intrigue? Nicola said he didn’t know and wouldn’t speak if he did. It was a time for prudence.
Veuillot pretended to flinch. ‘An episcopal rebuke! What about freedom of speech? Our English friend will be scandalised to hear a Liberal bishop – sorry, sorry, Monsignore, the word slipped out!’
‘The word doesn’t frighten me,’ Nicola told him.
‘And it didn’t frighten Darboy! Indeed, gentlemen, what we have here is a priest physically captured by forces which held him mentally captive all his life! What now are the odds?’ asked Veuillot. ‘Will he die well or will he cringe and …’
‘I’m sure you’d offer him vinegar on a sponge! A good death is not in a man’s control.’
‘Oh, forgive me!’ Veuillot feigned distress. ‘Now I’ve reminded you of Cardinal Amandi’s death which…’
Nicola left the table. He regretted provoking an incident, but anger was his barrier against grief. He had trouble containing a prickling in his eyes, as he stared down light shards which sprang, like the spokes of a monstrance, from mirrored chandeliers.
*
The Polish lady was creating a diversion at the piano, so Nicola seized his chance to ask Monsignor Chigi whether the Pope had made an appeal on Darboy’s behalf to Monsieur Thiers.
The nuncio said no and that it would by unwise to call too often on the diminished store of good will now left to the Church.
‘But I was assured before leaving Rome …’ Nicola did not mention Prospero’s promise.
Chigi took his arm. ‘I wish I thought such an appeal would make a difference, Monsignore …’ He made a helpless gesture. ‘Let us comfort ourselves with music.’
*
The air was raw with woodsmoke and the sun, probing pocks and freckles in the dressed stone of Versailles, gave the town a look of old marzipan in a pastrycook’s window.
Nicola’s landlady had put a copy of Veuillot’s paper, l’Univers, on her lodger’s breakfast tray. She had circled an item: General de Fabrice, head of the Prussian GHQ at Soisy, had confidentially informed the Commune that if it shot the hostages, Prussia would punish the crime, ‘in Europe’s name’.
Thank God, thought Nicola. Then: might this threat, now that it was public, backfire and stiffen Darboy’s captors? Anxious to hear Lagarde’s opinion, he called at his lodgings and, failing to find him, drove to Mount Satory from whose summit one could see Paris. What was going on there? Should he go and see? What if, instead, he were to request a meeting with Monsieur Thiers and claim to have a message for him from the Pope? Would Monsignor Chigi deny him thrice? He would. It was a lunatic notion.
In the afternoon, he drifted into the château grounds, where a concert was in progress, and ran into Mr Blount, who asked if he had heard the news. What news? About Cluseret. ‘Remember? The Commune’s Minister of War. He’s lost his command and been sent to Mazas prison.’ The official explanation, said the Englishman, was that Issy, one of the forts held by the Communard troops, had been temporarily abandoned. But as Cluseret himself had promptly retaken it, this didn’t hold water. No, the real reason had to be Cluseret’s contacts with the Prussians and the fact that he had signed a paper – Blount claimed to have proof of this – agreeing to release Darboy. The contacts had been secret and would have remained so but for the item in l’Univers. ‘If it was leaked when Veuillot first knew it,’ said Blount, ‘then he brought down Cluseret.’
And dished Darboy’s chances?’
‘Absolutely. The Commune has now appointed a Committee of Public Safety which will be hard to deal with because its members distrust each other. It has already repudiated Cluseret’s order to release Darboy. Is there any reason,’ asked Blount, ‘to think the Vatican might prefer him not to be rescued? No? Forgive me. It was just a thought.’ Before taking leave, he invited Nicola to dine, later, at the Hotel des Réservoirs.
*
Calling again on the abbé, Nicola found him in a state of prostration over the failure of a plan, which had pivoted on the Prussian approach to Cluseret. Lagarde’s go-between, the daughter of an aide-de-camp of the Tsar of Russia, had had to mobilise princely contacts, and it had taken weeks of manoeuvring up and down hierarchies of blue-blood lines and across enemy ones before the thing was done. Now – the abbé’s groan had the knell of a death rattle.
‘What about the Poles?’
Lagarde blenched. ‘Can nobody keep a secret? How do you know about them?’ A Polish group, he admitted, was trying bribery. For God’s sake, Monsignore, don’t let this go any further. Cluseret was gone, but some of the men contacted were still in place. What was lacking was the 60,000 francs that they wanted.
‘Monseigneur,’ said the unhappy Lagarde, ‘cannot be told. He talks too openly to his captors, so it is safer to let him and others think I am saving my own skin and doing nothing.’ In fact, though, the Poles’ Communard contacts had already managed to obtain the release of the prelate’s sister, Mademoiselle Darboy.
*
The Hotel des Réservoirs, once the pretty residence of Madame de Pompadour, was now so seething with customers that, without Mr Blount’s invitation, Nicola could not have eaten there. Tables, he learned from his host, were booked from morning till night and, when the last diners left, table-cloths were replaced by mattresses and the dining room became a dormitory.
Mr Blount pointed out the English Ambassador, Lord Lyons, and other well-known people, then said, ‘I have a surprise for you. An old friend of yours will be joining us.’
It was Flavio, who, though courtly as ever, had a tremor in his eyelid. He was still struggling with the aftermath of what the press was calling ‘the Langrand labyrinth of swindles’. Thanks to Nicola’s paper, he had come unscathed through the Belgian phase of court cases but a French one threatened and his present respite was due only to the fact that the prosecution’s papers were in Paris and unreachable in the Palais de Justice. Langrand, facing personal charges of fraudulent bankruptcy, was likely to skip to America. ‘It’s hard to blame him,’ said the forgiving Flavio. ‘He was a paladin of the imagination. His account books are a cross between dream books and explorers’ charts. He was too good a Catholic to be a good businessman. His venture was a prayer.’
This sparked off a hope in Nicola’s head. Could Flavio get his hands on the money needed to ransom Darboy? Langrand must have secret caches? From what the papers said, so much was missing that nobody would miss more, so why not use it in a good cause? ‘It will bring you both luck,’ he cajoled. Ad removendam maiorem calamitatem, one could, he saw, with shame, cease to care about shame. Briefly, he felt a flicker of fellow-feeling for Mastai.
Flavio, though surprised, agreed to provide the money.
*
The Abbé Lagarde was too agitated to listen to Nicola’s news. He had had two letters from different groups of Parisian clergy. One summoned him back to Paris ‘to avoid bloodshed’, while the other said that if he were to return without an agreement for an exchange of hostages, the Communards would shoot the archbishop.
The abbé, looking wizened and twitchy, said, ‘I pray for guidance, Monsignore, but how can I trust my judgment when others don’t?’ He was thinking of Darboy, who had sent a bitter letter ordering him to return forthwith, no matter how things stood.
‘You must disobey him.’
‘But he thinks I’m a traitor and a coward.’
‘That’s your cross. His is being in Mazas gaol. Besides,’ said Nicola, surprising himself, ‘it’s a time when loyalty is best shown not by obedience but by the opposite.’
The abbé looked mildly cheered. He had a guest, a man in secular clothing. This was le Père Amodru, who had brought one of the letters from Paris. The Communards, said Amodru, were growing desperate. Cluseret’s fall was a sign of panic. ‘Which means,’ he warned, ‘that extremists are taking over and bribes harder to give.’
‘We failed them!’ groaned Lagarde. ‘They were our flock!’ But it was no time, his companions reminded him, for such concerns.
‘Monsieur Plou, Monseigneur’s lawyer …’
‘Has he been allowed to see him again?’
‘No, but when he did see him he found him unrecognisable. Monseigneur has grown a beard, lost weight, wears a wretched old soutane and black nightcap …’
Nicola, leaving t
hem, walked out into the stately, ramshackle town. Under the Empire, this seat of royal pride had been deliberately allowed to run down, and now houses were requisitioned and streets looked as though people had been picnicking in them. Passing a café, he found himself crunching oyster shells. Versailles! The name hissed like a sad cacophony of ghosts. Evading them, he tried to imagine the racy, energetic France of Napoleon III.
Prisoners, taken in the fighting outside the Paris walls, were being herded past. Former National Guardsmen, not drunk now, though they had allegedly been so for months on looted wine, they stared with unfocusing, furious, stunned eyes. They were hobbled together and had to be protected by their escort of regular soldiers from assaults. The abbé’s lost flock! A soldier pushed aside a well-dressed woman who was spitting and the spit fell short.
Thirty-two
Flavio now disappeared to raise ransom money – or to abstract it from his creditors’ grasp – and Blount brought back a copy of a proclamation which was posted all over Paris. It promised ‘a new … positive and scientific era in place of the old clerical world … and of the militarism, monopolism and privilege to which the proletariat owes its servitude and the nation its downfall’.
‘They may whistle for their new era, now,’ said Blount. The city was being bombarded and he believed the Army could take it if it chose. ‘Thiers,’ he speculated, ‘is drawing things out.’
In mid-May, exiled Parisians, observing their city from Mount Satory, were surprised to witness the fall of the pillar on the place Vendôme. It had been made from German cannon captured during the Napoleonic wars, so the watchers guessed the Prussians to be to blame and the Commune hand in glove with them!
The Judas Cloth Page 72