A few hours after the consistory had come to its expected conclusion, the French envoy, Monsieur de Vil- leneuve, arrived in Rome and sought immediate audience with Alexander. It was immediately granted, for he brought with him an impressive document in which Louis, king of France, invested his well-beloved cousin, Caesar Borge, "his heirs and successors in perpetuity with our comtes and seigneuries of Valentinois and Dyois, their appurtenances and dependencies, together with all powers regarding the administration of justice therein. . . ." The document had been drawn up before Villeneuve left the royal court at Amboise and, reading it, Cesare might have come to the reasonable conclusion that, over the past few days, he had been simultaneously cardinal of Valencia and duke of Valentinois. Louis, however, had exceeded the generous powers of even a king of France, so anxious had he been to obtain the much-desired dispensation for his own marriage.
When the Paris parlement met in October it was forcefully pointed out to Louis that he had not simply created a duke on paper, but had established in a large and wealthy area of France a foreign prince whose powers, by feudal law, were absolute under the king. An Italian enclave had, in effect, been created in France—and, far worse, given to a member of a family notoriously Spanish in its sympathies. Cesare's imminent arrival helped Louis smooth the matter over, for parlement had no desire to create the kind of situation that would have resulted if the pope's son had been turned away under humiliating conditions. But the crisis showed clearly enough what France's leaders thought of the bargain between king and pope.
Cesare left Rome for France on October 1, and in noting his departure, Burchard appears to have made one of his rare factual errors. Cesare left Rome "in secret and without pomp" according to the master of ceremonies; but the French, in fact, were astonished by the almost barbaric magnificence of Cesare's entourage. It was a curious, uncharacteristic error for a man not only in the habit of being precise, but to whom would naturally have fallen the task of organizing the ceremony of departure. If Burchard did not make such an extraordinary blunder in his diary, the implication is that Alexander feared a popular demonstration against Cesare and arranged for his entourage to join him discreetly some distance from Rome. Certainly the papal treasury had been plundered to equip the fortunate young man; by a happy coincidence the bishop of Calahorra had recently been found guilty of heresy, and his confiscated wealth paid for part of Cesare's French mission. Altogether, nearly a quarter of a million ducats were spent to provide Cesare with pocket money and dress him in suitable style. Rumor sped around Italy that the very shoes of his horses were made of silver and deliberately loosened so they should fall off as largess. Such a story belonged to fables, but it owed its origin to a genuine and widespread belief that Alexander had ignored cost in launching Cesare upon his new career.
The dead Juan might now never have existed. The letter despatched to France ahead of Cesare to prepare his way spoke of him in the terms of extravagant love that once had been aroused by Juan alone. Writing to Louis, Alexander said, "We destine to your Majesty our heart—that is, our favorite son, Duke Valentino, who is prized by us beyond all else as a signal and most estimable token of our affection toward Your Highness—to whom no further recommendation of him is required." 45 Abraham might have spoken of Isaac in rather similar terms, and the king of France was left in no doubt whatsoever that if he wanted the father's friendship, the son's desires would have to be satisfied.
Cesare arrived by sea at Marseilles on October 11, where he was received by a royal salute of artillery, and entertained extravagantly for ten days. He then took the road north for Avignon. The city was papal territory and, over the past fortnight, its parlement had been in anxious conference with the papal legate especially appointed for the purpose of Cesare's mission. There was a certain piquancy in the fact that the legate was Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the bitter enemy of Cesare's father, now apparently dedicating himself to the comfort and honor of Cesare himself. After three years of exile, della Rovere had discovered that the old, well-tried Italian method of expediency was to be preferred to the striking of expensive attitudes. He had failed, totally and humiliatingly, to unseat his enemy and had retired to France with the unfortunate Charles. Delia Rovere, in his favored position at the French court, was well-placed to harass Alexander if he chose, but at the cost of permanently undermining his long-term prospects. Only in Rome was a man such as della Rovere fully at home. Only in the cramped and cluttered lobbies and passages of the Vatican, in the palaces and villas of the great could an ambitious man keep track of the subtle, ever-changing patterns of intrigue and policy; noting the inflection of voice, the fleeting expression of face that indicated a shift of direction which might make one man's fortune even while it destroyed another. Della Rovere had made the first move toward a reconciliation. At Juan's death he wrote a condoling letter to the shattered father. Alexander accepted the gesture; he may, perhaps, have been unusually vulnerable during the terrible days following the murder, but he was also well aware of della Rovere's high standing at the court of France. Fulsome letters passed between the two and out of them arose della Rovere's appointment as papal legate to the court.
The new legate's first duty was to arrange a fitting reception for the new duke of Valentinois, and the council of Avignon was persuaded to raise a loan for the purpose. An embassy was despatched to Marseilles to meet the duke, and the council itself debated what form the festivities should take. Avignon's city fathers were somewhat hampered by the fact that there was no precedent to guide them in the matter of entertaining the son of a pope, but they concluded, correctly, that they could not do better than by treating him as any other young, handsome prince. Rich men liked rich presents and the council therefore voted their guest a remarkable collection of valuable hardware, some eighteen pieces of silver plate valued at three thousand florins. The city's own prestige demanded that it should be splendidly decorated with hangings and triumphal arches, the processional route strewn with clean sand and dotted with selected fountains gushing carefully calculated quantities of cheap red wine. "And finally, that no expression of joy may be wanting, he shall be feted in the Maison de la Ville with ladies and beautiful girls, for the said Don Cesare takes much pleasure therein, knowing well how to dance with, and entertain them. The dances are to be morrises, mummeries and other frivolities." 46
From Avignon Cesare moved on to Valence, the ducal town of his duchy, where he was installed with all the honors due his dual rank of royal duke and papal favorite. More days of banquets and masques, moralities and mummeries followed before he moved on to Lyons, where the sequence was repeated. It was not until the beginning of December, nearly two months after he had landed in France that, still leisurely, he took the road for Chinon and his meeting with King Louis. The scornfully slow progress irritated Louis, who was impatiently awaiting the dispensation Cesare supposedly was bringing with him, and a spirited protest was made to Rome. Alexander hastened to conciliate the king. It was not due to any lack of goodwill on his part, he assured Louis, but he was bound by his own canon lawyers. The divorce commissioners had not yet examined all the evidence, and until they had done so and come to a conclusion, he had no power to pronounce a divorce.
Alexander's well-known love for legality now gave him useful room to maneuver. There was little doubt that the commissioners were moving at a normal bureaucratic pace, and also that Alexander could have prodded them into greater celerity. He did not choose to, for the delay kept Louis in a healthy state of uncertainty. The situation was to add yet another lurid tale to the growing Borgia legend. As Machiavelli told the story some time later: "The dispensation was given to Valentino when he went to France, without anyone being aware of its existence, with orders to sell it dearly to the king. But the king learned from the bishop of Ceuta that the dispensation already existed, and so, without having received or even seen it, the marriage was celebrated, and for revealing what he did the bishop of Ceuta was put to death by orders of Valentino." 47 Th
e bishop of Ceuta, a trusted papal envoy, was well known; and Machiavelli must have been aware that he did not, in fact, die until over a year after the French mission—in Italy, of wounds received in battle. And Machiavelli, an experienced diplomat, must also have known that Louis was not the kind of man to risk his crown for the reasons given. In fact in early December Cesare and Louis were simultaneously informed of the divorce commission's findings, the bull of nullification was published throughout France on December 17, and Cesare was then free to meet Louis and begin his own negotiations. But Machiavelli's story would have lost its point without the twist at the end, and it was accordingly woven in its totality into the web of legend. Thus Cesare was credited with two murders in a little over a year.
That autumn in France was bitterly cold, with almost ceaseless gales of wind and rain lashing to tatters the expensive decorations of the municipalities on Cesare's route. Nevertheless, his progress attracted astonishing attention. Crowds followed wherever he moved, staring silently for the most part as though at some rare and dangerous animal. A member of Cesare's party wrote home saying they had seen nothing of trees and houses in France, nothing but people pressing around and an occasional glimpse of watery sunlight overhead. The experience seems to have gone to his head, for he lacked the maturity to recognize it for what it was: a fascinated but unsympathetic interest in him as a member of a notorious family. Humility was never Cesare Borgia's outstanding characteristic, and under the heady influence of apparent fame he became peremptory, insufferably haughty; alienating those Frenchmen who might have been disposed to assess him apart from his family's reputation, even while confirming in the rest the belief that nothing but trouble ever came out of Italy. He completely misjudged the society in which he found himself. In Italy his gaudy magnificence went almost unnoticed among men who assessed power and wealth by its outward display of velvets and jewels. France, provincial by contrast, still tended to measure a man by older, more sober standards; and Cesare's display, intended to impress, aroused only derision particularly in the royal court which took its standards from the parsimonious Louis.
Louis's restlessly moving court had established itself temporarily at Chinon in the same fabled castle from where, seventy years earlier, his cowering ancestor had been dragged by Joan of Arc to receive a crown. That shameful episode was forgotten now, for the English had long since been thrown out of France; and Louis was the most powerful monarch in Europe, undisputed lord of the largest united state between the Arctic and the Mediterranean. Toward Cesare there was, therefore, a delicate point of etiquette to be resolved. His enigmatic status again posed a problem in a society where precedent and precedence counted for everything. How did a monarch such as Louis receive a pope's bastard? It was known that Cesare was, deplorably, planning some sort of triumph for his entry into Chinon; and while it would be embarrassing for the king of France to be overshadowed by the magnificence of a private person without official status, it could also prove a grave mistake to welcome him in like regal style. The problem was solved ingeniously. It was decided that Louis and Cesare would meet "spontaneously" at the head of the castle's great staircase as though one man were simply welcoming another into his home.
One of the towers of the castle directly commanded the main street of the little town; and it was there on the morning of December 19 that Louis stationed himself to watch, with open scorn, Cesare's gaudy advent. But though the king himself mocked the display, an anonymous member of the crowd was sufficiently impressed to record, in painstaking detail and lamentable verse, the appearance both of Cesare and his retinue. The unknown poetaster lacked both the ability and interest to attempt any description of the man himself and of the crowd's reaction to him, but the laborious catalogue provides clear enough evidence of what Cesare considered appropriate for a state occasion. The impression conveyed is of bottomless vulgarity, the desire of a parvenu to obscure his origins behind a blaze of displayed wealth. Cesare was never to make that mistake again; it stemmed mostly from lack of experience and Cesare was, above all, capable of learning from experience. But it did him considerable harm during the first vital days of his contact with the French court.
The lengthy file of heavily laden sumpter mules that led Cesare's cavalcade were expensively decked out in his colors of scarlet and yellow, each animal conspicuously bearing the Borgia crest of the ox and his own insignia of the flame. The crowd's attention was particularly attracted to two immense chests, each covered with a length of cloth of gold, which were borne in ritual isolation as though they were the shrines of a religious procession. Some claimed they contained the priceless jewels which had been collected for Cesare's fortunate bride; others maintained that one chest, at least, contained the equally priceless dispensation for the king. Sixteen gentlemen of Cesare's court followed on horses caparisoned, in the Spanish manner, with towering cockades of gold and furnished with silver bridles and stirrups. Behind them came twenty mounted pages dressed in crimson velvet or cloth of gold. And finally came Cesare himself surrounded by sixty gentlemen, some of whom were his personal staff, grim-faced Spanish mercenaries whose finery did not conceal the fact that they were highly efficient killers; and the rest were Roman noblemen who had considered it politic to make the long, expensive journey with the new star so suddenly risen on the Roman horizon.
Cesare appeared in a blaze of jewels. His basic costume was the curiously somber black velvet which he was afterwards to adopt habitually, but on this occasion it was slashed to show the gold brocade of the undergarment. Gold buttons, each with a ruby in the center, fastened his doublet. Pearls and more rubies were in his hat and on his boots. Diamonds flashed upon his chest. Gold caparisoned his superb warhorse—gold beaten out into leaves to overlay the harness or worked into a net, embroidered with pearls, to confine the sweeping tail.
"Altogether too much for the petty duke of Valentinois," Louis sneered, but descended to greet his guest effusively and almost snatch from him the long-awaited dispensation. The preparations for Louis's marriage had long since been made, and the ceremony accordingly took place almost immediately.
For Cesare there was no equal satisfaction. Almost the first thing he learned on his arrival at Chinon was that Carlotta of Aragon was even firmer in her intention of having nothing to do with him. Carlotta enjoyed an unusually strong position for an unmarried girl who had refused a dynastic marriage. She was a lady-in-waiting not in Louis's court but that of his new bride, Anne of Brittany. The nobleman Carlotta wanted to marry was a Breton and Anne had taken her side. The queen was a strong-minded woman with a lively awareness of her own rights and importance. Her championship of Carlotta was probably due less to a liking for feminine intrigue than from a desire to make clear to her husband that she was the loyal protectress of all things Breton. Louis, in any case, was less than ardent in Cesare's cause; and as the days passed into weeks, with Carlotta remaining stubborn and Louis displaying helplessness, it became obvious that Pope Alexander had, for once, been thoroughly outwitted. It was natural that Louis would lose interest once the vital dispensation was safe in the royal archives; Alexander had calculated that closely enough when he employed his own delaying tactics. But what he had not known was that Louis's plans were diametrically opposed to his own. Louis's plans envisaged nothing less than another French attack on Naples; and it seems highly unlikely that Louis ever seriously considered bringing about a marriage between the Borgia, whom he needed as allies, and the house of Aragon, which he intended to destroy. Altogether, the forces brought to bear on Carlotta of Aragon neatly canceled each other, and she was eventually able to indulge in the rare luxury of marrying the man she loved.
Louis had no desire openly to antagonize the Borgia clan, and a pretense was kept going that Carlotta was still open to persuasion. But Cesare knew better. In Paris the students at the Sorbonne put on an entertaining little masque in which the "son of God" pursued an unwilling bride. Though the students were traditionally, almost professionally, irreverent; and
though authority acted promptly if clumsily, simultaneously closing the show and provoking a riot—it gave a sharp edge to Cesare's personal humiliation. He reacted badly, giving further grounds for offense and for mockery as an unsuccessful gallant. He sulked, accused Louis of bad faith and even withdrew from the court with the declared intention of returning home and complaining in person to his father. Giuliano della Rovere found himself in an unpleasant position as the go- between who had failed in his self-appointed task. He tried to conciliate Alexander by excusing Cesare and lavishing praises upon him. "By his modesty, his readiness, his prudence and his other virtues he has gained everybody's affection. The young lady, however, either through sheer perversity—or because she has been influenced by others, which is easier to believe—absolutely declines to hear of the wedding." Alexander refused to be conciliated, and in a furious letter to his legate he declared that he had been made a laughingstock. "All Europe was very well aware that, but for the French king's plain promise to find a wife for him, Cesare would have remained in Italy."
The Fall of the House of Borgia Page 17