The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  On reaching Mentone, Clovis sold most of the jewels in the Jew’s casket, ‘reserving only twelve fine and glistering rubies of which he was much enamoured’, to a travelling Venetian merchant, journeyed to Rouen, and there used the proceeds of the sale to hire ‘a goodly band’ of knights, mounted serjeants and well-armed footmen. The first expedition he made with this company was to the Château des Larmes, near Reims, where the Marquis de Maubeuge was then in residence. Clovis, having apparently arrived in amity, asked for his bride and her dowry, ‘which the noble Marquis Carlus would there and then have fain delivered to him (less the sum paid for his ransom), had it not been discovered to his ears by a treacherous servitor of the Lord Clovis that his master the Lord Clovis had been shorn of his manhood by the knife of a Moorish chirurgeon. On being so apprised, the Marquis Carlus deposed that the law both secular and ecclesiastical forbade him to marry his daughter to an eunuch; upon which the Lord Clovis caused his company to massacre the noble Marquis, his wife, his sons, his daughter that was betrothed to the Lord Clovis, and all retainers and servitors whatever down to the puling babes of the meanest serf of the cloaca. This extermination being completed, the noble Clovis did proclaim himself Lord of the castle and of all the lands of the Marquisate, upon surety whereof he raised gold from the Jews of Strasbourg to augment his chivalry and puissance.’

  So formidable a warlord did Clovis now prove himself that before long he prevailed upon the King to recognize him in the title, as won by conquest, of Marquis de Maubeuge, and in the possession, as royal feudatory immediate, of several castles, counties, baronies, feoffs and lordships in the North of France, which had been overrun by him at the head of his growing private army. At this stage a majority of the chief magnates in the area, who had hitherto merely despised Clovis, decided that it would be more discreet, at least for the time being, to appease him; and after a labyrinthine process of bargains and concessions (few if any of the latter being made by Clovis) an accommodation was reached which confirmed the new Marquis de Maubeuge as holder of his dignities and territories, not only by assignment of the King who reigned in Paris but (rather more to the practical point) by consent of the Peers who ruled in Picardie.

  Such a record of conquest and attainment might have seemed to discount the legend of the Jew’s curse – had not Clovis, within two years of becoming, so to say, respectable, been impaled by the portcullis of the Château des Larmes while waving off a guest, none other than the Duc de Picardie, at the castle gate. How this hideous accident occurred has never been explained, though there were those, according to the chronicler, who affirmed at the time ‘that a youth of fair, smooth face and lustrous hair of gold, a stranger to all, was observed mingling with the company of the Duke’s esquires just before His Highness departed from the castle; and that this youth was taken by the Lord Marquis’ his men to be one of the Most Noble Duke’s but afterward denied by His Grace and all his attendants, who vouchsafed they knew him not but had taken him for a squire or page of my Lord Marquis; and that this youth was seen to walk into the guardhouse by the gate tower, wherein was the hinged stanchion of iron that released the portcullis at need, and wherein was no man else as all were gathered in the castle yard to do honour to His Highness; and that it was but a moment after the youth had gone thither that the portcullis fell on my Lord Marquis; wherefore search high and low was afterwards made for this youth, who was seemingly gone into the air…’

  But whatever the cause of Clovis’ death, dead he was and without an heir. His recently acquired lordships and estates lay open for any man to grab, and might well have been seized by claimants true or false within days; but it so happened that the Duc de Picardie, during his visit to the Château des Larmes, had been much diverted by the attentions of Clovis’ widowed sister, the Lady Philippa, ‘who had come to his chamber nightly and there lewdly disported herself on the person of the Duke’s Highness, though ever afterward she swore herself pure, and said that the wench who went ramping to His Grace, though young and tender almost to childery as was herself and dark withal of her own raven blackness was another (yet who she could not say) and that as for herself, it was for her songs and wit and company that His Highness did her favour…’ Howbeit, whatever the reason for the Duke’s partiality for the widow Philippa, whether it was her social arts or her sexual graces, His Highness proved a good and strong friend in time of need: he took Philippa and her son under his protection, and negotiated a royal deed of inheritance, whereby the baby boy, though he was not allowed to succeed to the Marquisate of Maubeuge, was declared perpetual castellan of the Château des Larmes within that Marquisate and true heir to all other lands and titles whatever of which the late Lord Clovis had been seized, the chief of these honours being the Countship of La Tour d’Abbéville.

  Philip, the infant child, was now renamed Clovis Philip du Bourg de Maubeuge – the latter being retained as a Christian name, no doubt to compensate for loss of the title. In course of time he grew, under the tutelage of his mother and the Duc de Picardie, to be a fine young man, commanding yet courteous, noted not only for his martial skills but for his intellectual tastes, unusual attributes in a nobleman of the period. However, just as he had reached his prime and married a bride of almost royal rank, a most gruesome stroke of fate obtruded itself. A learned alchemist, whom the young Count was lodging at the Château des Larmes while they conducted certain experiments together, administered to his noble patron a potion which would in supposition induce celestial visions but in fact afflicted him with a profound and unassailable melancholy, after some weeks of which he slit his throat with a hunting knife. The alchemist later swore that none of the ingredients in the potion, as he mixed it, could have brought about this unhappy result, and accused his apprentice of adding dangerous substances while his own back was turned. But the apprentice, a youth who had been seldom seen by the inmates of the castle and always appeared in a cowl so deep as virtually to mask him, had fled shortly after the potion was administered and was never found that he might be put to the question; and the alchemist himself answered at the stake for the young nobleman’s misfortune.

  Meanwhile, the Comtesse de la Tour d’Abbéville was swollen with her dead husband’s child, which issued as twin boys, the second of whom died at birth. Once more the fortunes of the house rested upon an infant in arms whom grotesque disaster had rendered fatherless; once more the mother of the infant found a protector (her cousin, the Cardinal Archbishop of Chartres) to ensure to her offspring the dignities and domains due to him.

  The succession of an infant heir was to become a common event in the turbulent history of this family, in whose affairs during the next 150 years a pretty consistent pattern was seen to establish itself. The Comtes de la Tour d’Abbéville (whose family name was finally defined, in 1174, as du Bourg de Maubeuge) usually came very young to the title, were well protected during their childhood, prospered mightily in their early maturity and were then struck down, at their zenith, by obscene accidents or illnesses which in the long run or more commonly the short proved lethal. Their untimely and painful deaths were attributed to the Curse of the Jew of Antioch, which attached itself, in the public belief, to those jewels of Baudouin du Bourg’s original gift that had been retained by Clovis du Bourg on his return from Outremer. These had continued in the family and were, as we have already learned from the chronicler, ‘twelve fine and glistering rubies’ – which became known, around 1300, as ‘The Twelve Roses of Picardie’, while the curse associated with them was henceforth called ‘The Curse of the Roses’.

  At this stage, one might well inquire why the family did not sell or otherwise rid themselves of the fatal Roses. The answer appears to be that they had come to regard the rubies, not only as carrying a curse, but also as at the same time promoting, in some mysterious way, the undoubted wealth and worldly power of their line. If pressed in the matter, the du Bourgs de Maubeuge would have argued that during the time the rubies had been theirs the family, though previously of med
iocre fortune, had won and kept, in addition to the fine countship of La Tour d’Abbéville, the almost equally rich countships of Douai and Valenciennes, the Viscountcy of Le Touquet (in those days just a square tower on an island in a salt marsh but nevertheless a thing of esteem), the Honour of Vouziers, the Baronies of Montreuil, Péronne and Gournay, and, among numerous seigneuries, those of Bapaume, Clermont, Montvidier and Forges-les-Eaux (Forculus Aquarum). Now, if it were the rubies that had conferred all the family’s afflictions since their acquisition, why should it not be they that had also conferred the concomitant and palpable distinctions? With the rubies had come the glories as well as the calamities; if the gems had bestowed the latter, why not the former? If one had then urged that there was no legend of a Blessing, only of a Curse, the du Bourgs de Maubeuge would have retorted that legends of benevolence are less readily transmitted, that many men must have possessed the rubies before the Jews of Antioch, and that there was no reason why the power of the gems for good or ill should not owe as much to the unreported charity of a previous owner as it did to the much publicized spleen of the Hebrew. Which being the case, the intransigent du Bourgs de Maubeuge would have continued, they reckoned they had a fair bargain, provided the riches and prestige brought by the rubies were always theirs to enjoy during the really quite generous intervals which separated the catastrophes.

  So the rubies continued in the family and the family continued in general prosperity and occasional bane. We might take 1497 as a year typical of their fortunes. Three things of note occurred: the Roses were sent to Venice to be set in a necklace by Lorenzo di Torcello; the Count of the day, Clovis Raymond, visiting Venice to collect the finished necklace, won a handsome palace on the Canale di Cannaregio in a game of dice; and his eldest son, back in France, had the top of his head taken off in a friendly jousting match with his younger brother.

  This last was one of the few instances in which the curse attacked a child of the family rather than the head of it. After such instances the reigning Count was sometimes allowed to attain an unusual length of years – as indeed happened here, for Count Clovis Raymond was over 70 before he died of a fit while fornicating with a whore called La Lubella in his Venetian palace. One should add that his successor survived him by barely two years; he fell through rotten boards into a castle cesspit, leaving an heir of five years old and thus reverting to the family pattern.

  The affairs of the family marched on in much the same way (usually prosperous, intermittently and briefly marred by savage calamity) for another 150-odd years, until 1652. Behold now the young and widowed Countess of that time (her husband just dead in a duel over a game of backgammon) fretting herself with boredom in a family mansion near Montreuil. Her two-year-old baby, the new Count, is an ugly and noisy child whom she puts largely in the care of nurses. Since the rule of law is more efficacious than it was in the days of the early Counts, she has no fear for her own or her son’s property, and she can therefore safely leave the administration of money and estates to the type of dilatory but more or less honest lawyers and factors who have had such matters in charge for some generations and have never robbed the family of more than a tolerable three livres in twenty.

  Thus the lady has no solid occupation and indeed has only two interests of any kind: the Necklace of the Roses, which as we saw, had been made up on Count Clovis Raymond’s instructions in Venice, and a young Dutch painter, Richard Van Hoek, who lodges in nearby Montreuil.

  The Necklace should be in hands other than hers, in secure keeping as an heirloom, but the lawyers like things to go on easily and do not wish to cause fuss and offence by insisting that she should part with it. Almost hourly she takes it from the box of alabaster in which she keeps it, and meditates, not on the curses or the blessings with which it may be informed, but on the rich, deep glow of the splendid stones and on the intricate work of gold in which Lorenzo di Torcello set and linked them. As for the painter, Van Hoek, she dotes on his youth, strength and purity, and is further pricked to desire by his manifest disdain of herself. Daily he comes to the mansion to finish the portrait of her husband on which he was engaged when the Count was killed; daily she presents herself to him while he works, gazes at him in supplication, flutters her hands in vain, caresses of the air, indicating that such caresses would be for him if he wished them; and daily her worship, her caresses, the bare throat which she displays – all are ignored or when not ignored despised by the proud young man at his easel. For he loves another, a young girl in Montreuil, Constance Fauvrelle. Her he would marry, save that her family is Protestant and to marry a Protestant in France is to draw invidious attention to oneself. Marriage must wait till both of them can leave France; they cannot leave France until he has money; he will not have money until he has finished the portrait of the late Count to the widow’s satisfaction; the widow will not be satisfied until she has sampled his flesh; and this the young painter will not permit, as he wishes to remain chaste for his Constance and is in any case disgusted by the perfumed and fluttering Countess Jezebel and her proffered harlotries.

  But one day the Countess shows him the Necklace of the Roses of Picardie. He has, of course, heard of it, but has never seen it until now. Dazzled by its magnificence, mesmerized by the fathomless pools of crimson, he exclaims that he will meet all her desires if only she will give him the Necklace. Now, though the lust is hot in her young and pampered veins, the Necklace is very dear to her; she knows, too, that it is very valuable, indeed invaluable; she knows that she is forbidden by law to give it away from the family; she knows that the du Bourgs de Maubeuge have had it for over 500 years and that their fate, for good or ill, is joined with it. She therefore makes a plan and then a bargain: she will give the Necklace to the painter, she says, if he will come twenty times to her couch and each time give her pleasure after a different fashion. The painter accepts the challenge; the lady laughs within her bosom, knowing that even if he succeeds in providing the almost impossible variety promised and takes away the Necklace after the twentieth coup of love, she has only to denounce him as a thief and the Necklace will be brought back to her.

  Richard Van Hoek, overcoming his physical and moral disgust in his eagerness to possess the matchless Roses, informing himself from rare books of devices wherewith to meet the demand of the Countess, comes to her nineteen times and each time pleasures her limbs and loins in a new manner. On the twentieth he pleasures her as never before (for despite himself he has begun to take pride and joy in his office); when he has done with her she swoons away from extremity of rapture, and (though he does not know it) her heart, which was but feeble, now ruptures itself from her excess. Leaving her in her chamber, taking the Necklace which he has worthily won, he returns to Montreuil – where he hears at once the cry of ‘Plague’ throughout the streets.

  For many days all is fear and confusion in the land. The trusted servants in the mansion of the Countess assume that their mistress, whose face is black with suffusion of blood, is dead of a sudden stroke of the plague. They bury her hugger-mugger and fly with the child to the distant Château des Larmes, not concerning themselves, in this hour of dread, with such trifles as jewels or necklaces.

  Meanwhile Van Hoek falls sick of the plague. He hands the Necklace to his beloved Constance, in reparation of his faithlessness to her, and dies. Constance, desperate to escape from Montreuil, which is guarded and ringed about by the King’s men that no bearer of death may leave it, bribes into marrying her an Official Purveyor of Meats to the Army, by offering the Necklace as her dôt, and is smuggled away by him in one of his conveyances out of the stricken town.

  Time passes; the plague abates; order is restored. The young Comte de la Tour d’Abbéville returns from the Château des Larmes to the mansion near Montreuil, under the wardship of an uncle and aunt. The family lawyers at length discover the disappearance of the Necklace, at first assume that it has been looted during the plague, are then put on a more accurate trail by one of the servants, who makes report of his
mistress’ liaison with Van Hoek. No doubt of it, Van Hoek will have the necklace. But Van Hoek is dead; where is his betrothed, Constance Fauvrelle? Fauvrelle no longer, her scandalized parents tell the lawyers: she has married an Army Contractor, one Louis Comminges, a Catholic for shame, in order to escape from Montreuil and desert her own kind and kindred. But where is he? Where has she taken the Necklace? No one knows or wishes to know. Her family now looks on Constance as dead. Shortly afterwards, fearing renewed persecutions as Protestants, they leave Montreuil for Sandwich, in England over the Channel. They will never again hear of Constance or be of any help to the lawyers who wish to trace her. Very well, say the lawyers: this Louis Comminges who married her, him we can surely trace, a Contractor who provides the military Commissariat cannot vanish into the air.

  But Louis Comminges has done exactly that. He has sold his office as Purveyor to another contractor – and he has taken his wife, and she has taken the Roses of Picardie and they have gone. Where? Into the vastness of France.

  From that time on the Necklace of the Roses disappeared completely. What became of Louis and Constance Comminges, who were their descendants, whether or not the Necklace was retained by them – all this is unknown to us. What is known, however, is that once the Comtes de la Tour d’Abbéville lost the Necklace their fortunes steadily declined. True, they no longer suffered the occasional and devastating visitations of the Curse; true also that after the events just recounted most of the family have died of old age in their beds. But the beds in which they died have been ever more hard and more narrow – and even, towards the end, verminous. For mark this, sage readers: since the seventeenth century the family of du Bourg de Maubeuge has descended slowly but inexorably from riches to comfort to bare competence to selling heirlooms to cadging meals to performing menial tasks to the outright poverty in which the last Count died in Amiens. This sad deterioration invites first a comment and then a question. The comment: it is known that the family continued, right up to the last to attribute its pauperization to the absence of the Roses, which had been the guardians of its fortunes as well as the scourge of its members. And the question: how did the lately dead Vicomte du Touquet, who a few days before his death was expelled in total destitution (so it was said in the Court of Inquest) from a lodging house in the slums of Lille contrive to pay his way hundreds of miles down to Aix-en-Provence and into an expensive Casino?