Blount explained again that Nicola had come to Paris in lay clothes and without papers for fear of falling into the hands of the fédérés. ‘I have papers,’ he offered, but was waved away. The colonel knew who he was, having seen him, it turned out, on a platform representing the Lord Mayor of London’s Relief Fund. And he had not been caught with a gun in his hands and powder on his face firing on our men. ‘But…’ began Blount and was interrupted.
The colonel, lean as a whippet and, under his steel demeanour, perhaps as tremulous, held up an arresting hand. ‘Your countrymen give asylum to all and sundry. It is one of your quirks. Any so-called “political” murderer who reaches your shores receives it. Therefore, Mr Blount, we do not easily let them out of our hands and into yours. This story has neither head nor tail. Bishop of Trebizond, you say! An Italian! Trebizond, when I was in school …’
‘It’s a diocese,’ said Nicola numbly, ‘in partibus infidelium.’
‘Infedelium? I’d say that was where you were apprehended! And you say the other desperado who was shooting at my men is a priest too? I don’t recognise such priests. We have heard horrors about what was done to real priests, including Archbishop Darboy, whom you claim you hoped to save. Sizeable bits of their brains are stuck to the wall out on the parapet walk. I have just seen them and they’re one of the reasons why I am shooting all assassins.’
Did he mean, asked Blount, he was sending suspects for trial?
No sir, said the colonel. He did not mean that. He showed Blount a proclamation. It was the last one put out by the retreating Reds. ‘I’ll read it to you: “Order: destroy all houses from whose windows shots have been fired on the National Guard and shoot all inhabitants unless they themselves … execute the perpetrators of such crimes. 24 May at 9 p.m. The Committee for War.” That’s the sort of war we’re fighting. So, no trial. However, though I shoot defrocked priests, I don’t shoot real ones. And though I do not doubt your word, you must permit me to doubt you perspicacity. Can you prove that this gentleman is what you say?’
Blount asked whether the Abbé Amodru, one of the released prisoners, was still in the building. Very likely, said the colonel. Fighting was still going on and few prisoners had left.
‘He’ll speak for him. They met in Versailles.’
The colonel said he would have the abbé called and would himself be back shortly. He left and Blount picked a cassock from a pile left, presumably, by the priests who had worn lay clothes to escape. Put it on, he begged Nicola. Encouragingly, he shook it out as a valet might have done, or a tailor’s assistant. ‘Without it, Amodru mightn’t know you. Besides, it will have a good effect on the colonel. He’s ready to crack. I can tell. All that logical talk through clenched teeth is a form of frenzy. This conflict is doing odd things to people. I had an uncle who used to tell me about living through the Sepoy Mutiny in India and how people became quietly unhinged – looked perfectly all right, then suddenly ran amok. Useful to have uncles like that. Does it fit?’
Nicola was apprehending things as though through a slatted blind. ‘Cracking’? Perhaps that was what it meant? Cracks in one’s inner landscape! Did what fit? Ah, the cassock. It was a Jesuit one. Wondering whether its owner was now dead, he ran his hands over the matted and faintly sticky cloth. It felt like skin.
The Abbé Amodru came in. He was horrified that Monsignor Santi should be doubted and far more so by what had happened to Darboy and the Jesuits. Yes, three had been shot with Monseigneur, and their Superior, Father Olivaint, had been with the group taken to the rue Haxo. ‘The warders are spilling secrets in the hope that we’ll speak up for them. Turncoats of the worst sort! Yesterday, several changed sides more than once.’ While the abbé talked there was a rattle of gunfire nearby. Rrrrrrr! He crossed himself. Another firing squad. He began to speak of Monseigneur’s death, which had sounded just like that. ‘We were all kneeling in our cells …’ There was another sharp explosion.
‘That’s the coup de grâce. I’m afraid,’ Blount told Nicola, ‘that those were your companions in arms.’
‘Three old Italians,’ confirmed the abbé. ‘I passed them on my way here.’
The colonel returned and took in the scene. Well, did the abbé vouch for His Lordship? His use of the title showed that he was now ready to be convinced. The abbé began to praise Monsignor Santi’s devotion to the cause of Monseigneur Darboy.
‘You’ve shot them!’ Nicola’s laggardly mind had just caught up. ‘You shot Don Mauro!’
‘… by no means defrocked,’ the abbé was assuring.
‘I am now!’ Nicola wrenched off the cassock – it was choking and clinging to him like a dead man’s skin. ‘I don’t want its protection. It’s Judas cloth! Shoot me! Shoot me now as well!’
But the Colonel, embarrassed by such a failure of decorum in a senior officer of our spiritual army, had faded from the room.
From the notebooks of the noble abbot Raffaello Lambruschini:
1873
Chance reveals latent patterns. Nicola Santi’s name has come up in connection with an inglorious little incident proving that the Church is secretly buying back bits of its lost kingdom. Since it may not do this legally, it uses laymen to hold the property in trust – at the risk that they may default. One who now has is Pietro Gatti, Duke Cesarini’s adoptive heir. On the duke’s death last year, Gatti nominally inherited a lot of such property which he is brazenly claiming as his own. State officials are amused, not to say cockahoop, since this must discourage fresh manoeuvres of the sort. They hint privately that, as Gatti is whispered to be the bastard of the Pope’s bastard – Santi – he is conforming to old usage. Plus ça change …! The Curia, to be sure, is without remedy and, sooner or later, must learn to do without the temporal.
Oddly, Santi said exactly this to me when explaining why he had flung his cassock – as they say – to the nettles. ‘The Commune,’ he claimed, ‘brought home to people the materialism of our spiritual arithmetic, which is why Darboy asked to be exchanged for Blanqui. He saw the coercive nature of the argument from martyrdom – not to mention how it begets violence.’
Why then, I asked Santi, did he ask to be shot? From shame, was his answer. ‘The Temporal Power corrupts,’ he argued and the staff colonel’s assumption that they belonged to similar corps outraged him as much as he outraged the colonel.
Apparently, he went to pieces then and Amodru had to take him to his cell and give him laudanum. Nobody could leave yet because of the fighting. He went to sleep and when he awoke, hours later, the sound in his ears was the rattle of the firing squad. This time it kept pausing and restarting and was punctuated by the shots which he knew now to be coups de grâce. He was petrified. It sounded as though many hundreds of men were being shot. Wondering whether he was hallucinating, he stumbled from the cell and went looking for his two companions. The building baffled him. It seemed like a maze, though he realised later that its west wing, which was where he was, consisted of a double row of cells with a courtyard on one side and a double parapet-walk on the other. It was out there that he came on a great pile of freshly killed bodies smelling of faeces and urine. A fresh rattle of gunfire made him bolt back in and up a spiral staircase which brought him within earshot of Blount and Amodru, who were in what had been Darboy’s cell. They had found words pencilled on the Judas hole in the form of a cross. These were robor vitae solus mentis which, said the abbé, if you read the cross as a word, spelled ‘the cross is the strength of life and the salvation of the soul’.
Just then the gun-rattle took up again and Santi began shrieking. ‘Don’t start a new legend!’ Alarmed lest he draw attention to himself again, they firmly frogmarched him out and into a carriage for which they had been waiting, and drove west across a Paris now entirely in the hands of the Army. Fighting was over but the ‘expiation’ was in full swing and the papers next day would describe the Seine as streaked with blood.
He learned later that what he had heard was the start of a great massacre of Com
munards. Nineteen hundred were shot in two days in La Roquette prison, and these were only a fraction of those killed in Paris that week, whose number some put at twenty thousand and some at forty thousand. The cross was no salvation at all and in many minds ‘Bloody Week’, as it came to be called, made it impossible to go on believing in the redemptive grace of Passion Week.
He went to England after that with Edward Blount, and only came back when he heard that his friend Cesarini was dying of consumption. He was with him at the end, then came to see me, on his way to Imola to give money to Sister Paola’s old hospital. He set up a secular institution there modelled on those Blount had shown him in London. When he left, he sent me a letter explaining that what he loved in Christianity was the compassionate teaching of Christ. Since this had been sacrificed to the ruthless defence of the Institutional Church, he, from love of Christ, had left it.
I heard no more of him.
1881
Prospero Cardinal Stanga read Lambruschini’s diary with close interest. It had reached him anonymously and, instead of deciding what to do with it, he lingered over familiar names and let memories of old friendships soften him. Prospero was not quite the man he had been, for he was on less good terms with the new regime than with the old one. The new Pope had turned down his plan to resurrect the Sodalitium Pianum and, gently, let him know that such intransigence had had its day. Grassi was dead. Another like-minded Jesuit from the Civiltà had had to go to America after an unfortunate confusion over the paper’s funds and Prospero himself was being kept far from the levers of power. The effect of this was that he had grown mild, reflective and a little lonely. The diary’s reference to Nicola reminded him of his own most recent glimpse of him which had been at Pio Nono’s funeral, a troubling occasion where the sight of a face from happier times had flooded him with emotion. Nicola, dressed as a layman, had been standing among the crowd, watching the procession. Starlight gleamed on his silk hat and caught an expression which impelled Prospero to lower his carriage window and, taking advantage of a pause, whisper his name. They were within a foot of each other and he could see Nicola’s cold face perfectly. ‘Please,’ whispered Prospero, thinking that the renegade might need to be set at ease.
But it was one of those moments – they were near the Tiber – when the rabble wanted to assault the hearse and it is not easy at such a time to convey feelings of friendship or even of bygones being bygones. Moreover, he was aware of his coachman’s anxieties lest the men close to the carriage have malevolent intentions.
‘Carogna!’ came the shouts. ‘Pitch the carrion in!’
‘Won’t you shake hands with me? Or even,’ he ventured, ‘sit in the carriage for a moment?’
But his hand had not been taken and his carriage shot forward leaving behind that pale, cold face. Why? he wondered. And for most of the funeral, it was not the rabble’s roar which bothered him, but that wounding personal rejection.
Glossary
Carbonari: a secret political association active in the early 19th century. Their aims varied. In the Papal States, these included reforms, a lay administration and even secession from papal rule by the northern Legations.
Centurioni: a voluntary, part-time police force set up after revolution of 1831 by the then Secretary of State, to keep order and check left-wing secret societies. They were generally acknowledged to be thugs.
Chamberlain: an official attached to the personal service of the Pope.
Coadjutor bishop: one appointed by the Pope to assist a bishop suffering from specified infirmities.
College of Cardinals: the ensemble of seventy cardinals who assisted the Pope in governing the Church.
Conclave: a meeting of all the cardinals to elect a Pope.
Congregations: departments or ministries which assisted the Pope in governing the Church. At the head of each was a prefect, usually a cardinal.
Curia: the authorities and functionaries forming the entourage or court of the Pope.
Encyclical: a circular letter addressed by the Pope to all his bishops.
Fédérés: in the Paris Commune, those members of the National Guard who joined the Communards.
Legations: in the Papal States, the provinces beyond the Apennines under the authority of papal legates. Provinces closer to Rome were governed by delegates. Both legates and delegates were clerics. Cities of the Legations were Ferrara, Bologna, Imola, Ravenna, Forli and Rimini.
Legate: An ecclesiastic representing the Holy See. A legate a latere – always a cardinal – was an emissary sent, for instance, to govern the northern papal provinces.
Motu Proprio: A papal rescript whose provisions were determined by the Pope personally.
Prelate: After the cardinals, prelates occupied the first rank in the Roman Curia. All bishops possessed the dignity and so did prominent officials of the Curia. Various requirements, financial and otherwise, had to be satisfied by a man entering the prelacy, though he need not be a priest. Once accepted, he was addressed as Monsignore and wore violet.
Roman Republic: the first Roman Republic, set up by the French in 1798, lasted eighteen months; the second, proclaimed by an elected Constituent Assembly in February 1849, lasted until 2 July.
Titular bishop: one deriving his title from a former bishopric lost – often by Muhammadan conquest – to the Roman Church. Curial officials often received such titles in partibus infidelium.
Ultramontanism: the doctrine of absolute papal supremacy. So called because churchmen north of the Alps looked for orders ‘beyond the mountains’ to Rome.
Zelanti: zealots, bigoted papalists, anti-Liberal and anti-reform.
About the Author
Julia O’Faolain was born in London in 1932. Educated at University College, Dublin, the University of Rome and the Sorbonne, she worked as a translator and language teacher before becoming a writer. Her works include the short story collections We Might See Sights! and Other Stories, Man in the Cellar and Daughters of Passion, and the novels Godded and Codded, Women in the Wall, No Country for Young Men, The Obedient Wife, The Irish Signorina and The Judas Cloth. She has edited (with husband Lauro Martines) Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians. As Julia Martines she translated Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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© Julia O’Faolain, 1992
The right of Julia O’Faolain to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–29019–2
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