The Royal Succession

by Maurice Druon

  At seventy-two the Cardinal was still finding fields in which he had not given his thought expression, and was completing his work while others slept. He used as many candles as a whole community of monks.

  During the nights he also worked at the huge correspondence which he maintained with numerous prelates, abbots, jurists, scholars, chancellors and sovereign princes all over Europe. His secretary and his copyists found their whole day’s work ready for them in the morning.

  Or again, he might consider the horoscope of one of his rivals in the Conclave, comparing it to his own sky, and asking the planets whether he would don the tiara. According to the stars, his greatest chance of becoming Pope was between the beginning of August and the beginning of September of the present year. And now it was already the 10th of June and nothing seemed to be shaping to that end.

  Then came that painful moment before the dawn. As if he had a premonition that he would leave the world precisely at that hour, the Cardinal felt a sort of diffused distress, a vague unease both of body and of mind. In his fatigue he questioned his past actions. His memories were of an extraordinary destiny. A member of a family of burgesses of Cahors, and still completely unknown at an age at which most men in those times had already made their career, his life seemed to have begun only at forty-four, when he had left suddenly for Naples in the company of an uncle, who was going there on business. The voyage, being away from home, the discovery of Italy, had had a curious effect on him. A few days after landing, he had become the pupil of the tutor to the royal children and had thrown himself into abstract study with a passion, a frenzy, a quickness of comprehension and a precision of memory which the most intelligent adolescent might have envied. He was no more subject to hunger than he was to the need for sleep. A piece of bread had often sufficed him for a whole day, and prison life would have been perfectly agreeable to him provided he had been furnished with books. He had soon become a doctor of canon law, then a doctor of civil law, and his name had begun to be known. The Court of Naples sought the advice of the cleric from Cahors.

  This thirst for knowledge was succeeded by a thirst for power. Councillor to King Charles II of Anjou-Sicily (the grandfather of Queen Clémence), then Secretary to the Secret Councils and the holder of numerous ecclesiastical benefices, he had been appointed Bishop of Fréjus ten years after his arrival, and a little later succeeded to the post of Chancellor of the kingdom of Naples, that is to say, first minister of a state which included both southern Italy and the whole county of Provence.

  So fabulous a rise among the intrigues of courts had not been accomplished merely with the talents of a jurist or a theologian. An event known to but few people, since it was a secret of the Church, shows the cunning and impudence of which Duèze was capable.

  A few months after the death of Charles II he had been sent on a mission to the Papal Court, at a time when the bishopric of Avignon – the most important in Christendom because it was the seat of the Holy See – happened to be vacant. Still Chancellor, and therefore the repository of the seals, he disingenuously wrote a letter in which the new King of Naples, Robert, asked for the episcopate of Avignon for Jacques Duèze. This he did in 1310. Clement V, anxious to acquire the support of Naples at a time when his relations with Philip the Fair were somewhat uneasy, had immediately acceded to the request. The fraud was discovered only when Pope Clement and King Robert met with mutual surprise, the first because he had received no thanks for so great a favour, the second because he considered the unexpected appointment, which deprived him of his Chancellor, somewhat cavalier. But it was too late. Rather than create useless scandal, King Robert turned a blind eye, preferring to keep a hold over a man who was to occupy one of the highest of ecclesiastical positions. Each had done well out of it. And now Duèze was Cardinal in Curia, and his works were studied in every university.

  Yet, however astonishing his career might be, it appeared so only to those who looked on it from the outside. Days lived, whether full or empty, whether busy or serene, are but days gone by, and the ashes of the past weigh the same in every hand.

  Had so much activity, ambition and expended energy any meaning, when it must all inevitably end in that Beyond of which the greatest intellects and the most abstruse of human sciences could glimpse no more than indecipherable fragments? Why should he wish to become Pope? Would it not have been wiser to retire to a cloister in detachment from the world; lay aside the pride of knowledge and the vanity of power; and acquire the humility of simple faith in order to prepare himself for death? But even meditating thus, Cardinal Duèze turned perforce to abstract speculation; and his concern with death became transformed into a juridical argument with the Deity.

  ‘The doctors assure us,’ he thought that morning, ‘that the souls of the just, immediately after death, enjoy the beatific vision of God, which is their recompense. So be it, so be it. But after the end of the world, when the bodies of the dead have risen again to rejoin their souls, we are to be judged at the Last Judgment. Yet God, who is perfect, cannot sit in appeal on His own judgments. God cannot commit a mistake and be thereby compelled to cast out of Paradise the elect He has admitted already. Moreover, would it not be proper for the soul to enter into possession of the joy of the Lord only at the moment when, reunited with its body, it is itself in its nature perfect? Therefore the doctors must be wrong. Therefore there cannot be either beatitude, as such, nor the beatific vision before the end of time, and God will permit Himself to be looked on only after the Last Judgment. But, till then, where are the souls of the dead? Do we wait perhaps sub altare Dei, beneath that altar of God of which Saint John the Divine speaks in his Apocalypse?’

  The noise of horses’ hooves, a most unusual sound at that hour, echoed along the abbey walls and across the little round cobbles with which the best streets in Lyons were paved. The Cardinal listened for a moment, then relapsed into the reasoning whose consequences were indeed surprising.

  ‘For if Paradise is empty,’ he said to himself, ‘it creates a singular modification in the condition of those whom we decree to be saints or blessed. And what is true for the souls of the just must necessarily be true also for the souls of the unjust. God could not punish the wicked before He has recompensed the just. The labourer receives his hire at the end of the day; and it must be at the end of the world that the wheat will be separated finally from the tares. There can be no soul at this moment living in Hell, since sentence has not yet been pronounced. And that is as much as to say that Hell, till then, does not exist.’

  This proposition was peculiarly reassuring to someone thinking of death; it postponed the date of the supreme trial without destroying the prospect of eternal life, and was more or less in keeping with the intuition, common to the greater part of men, that death is a falling into a dark and immense silence, into an indefinite unconsciousness.

  Clearly such a doctrine, if it were to be openly professed, could not fail to arouse violent attack both among the doctors of the Church and among the pious populace, and the moment was ill-chosen for a candidate to the Holy See to preach the inexistence of both Heaven and Hell, or their emptiness.3

  ‘We shall have to await the end of the Conclave,’ the Cardinal thought. He was interrupted by a monk in attendance who knocked on his door and announced the arrival of a courier from Paris.

  ‘Whom does he come from?’ asked the Cardinal.

  Duèze had a smothered, strangled, utterly toneless voice, though it was perfectly distinct.

  ‘From the Count de Bouville,’ replied the monk. ‘He must have ridden fast, for he looks very tired; when I went to open to him, I found him half-asleep, his forehead against the door.’

  ‘Bring him to me at once.’

  And the Cardinal, who had been meditating a few minutes before on the vanity of the ambitions of this world, immediately thought: ‘Can it be on the subject of the election? Is the Court of France openly supporting my candidature? Is someone going to offer me a bargain?’

  H
e felt excited, full of hope and curiosity; he walked up and down the room with little, rapid steps. Duèze was no taller than a boy of fifteen, and had a mouse-like face beneath thick white eyebrows and fragile bones.

  Beyond the windows the sky was beginning to turn pink; it was already dawn but not yet light enough to snuff the candles. His bad hour was over.

  The courier entered; at first glance, the Cardinal knew that this was no usual courier. In the first place, a professional would immediately have gone down on his knee and handed over his message-box, instead of remaining on his feet, bowing and saying, ‘Monseigneur …’ Besides, the Court of France sent its messages by strong, solidly built horsemen, well inured to hardship, such as big Robin-Cuisse-Maria, who often made the journey between Paris and Avignon, and not a stripling with a pointed nose, who seemed hardly able to keep his eyes open and reeled in his boots from fatigue.

  ‘It looks very like a disguise,’ Duèze thought. ‘And what’s more, I’ve seen that face somewhere before.’

  He broke the seals of the letter with his thin short hands and was at once disappointed. It did not concern the election. It was merely a plea for protection for the messenger. Nevertheless, he saw a favourable sign in this; when Paris desired some service from the ecclesiastical authorities, they now looked to him.

  ‘Allora, lei è il signore Guccio Baglioni?’fn1 he said, when he had finished reading.

  The young man started to hear himself addressed in Italian.

  ‘Si, Monsignore.’

  ‘The Count de Bouville recommends you to me that I may take you under my protection and conceal you from the enemies who are searching for you.’

  ‘If you will do me that favour, Monseigneur.’

  ‘It appears that you have had an unfortunate adventure which has compelled you to fly in that livery,’ went on the Cardinal in his rapid, toneless voice. ‘Tell me about it. Bouville says that you formed part of his escort when he brought Queen Clémence to France. Indeed, I remember now. I saw you with him. And you are the nephew of Messire Tolomei, the Captain-General of the Lombards of Paris. Excellent, excellent! Tell me your troubles.’

  He had sat down and was toying mechanically with a revolving reading-desk on which were a number of the books he used in his work. He now felt calm and relaxed, ready to distract his mind with other people’s little problems.

  Guccio Baglioni had ridden three hundred miles in less than four days. He could no longer feel his limbs; there was a thick fog in his head and he would have given anything in the world to stretch himself out on the floor and sleep and sleep.

  He managed to master himself; his safety, his love and his future all made it necessary that he should control his fatigue for a little longer.

  ‘Well, Monseigneur, I married a daughter of the nobility,’ he replied.

  It seemed to him that these words had issued from another’s lips. They were not those he would have wished to utter. He would have liked to explain to the Cardinal that an unparalleled disaster had overtaken him, that he was the most crushed and harrowed of men, that his life was threatened, that he had been separated, perhaps for ever, from the one woman without whom he could not live, that this woman was to be shut up in a convent, that events had befallen them during the last two weeks with such sudden violence that time seemed to have lost its normal dimensions, and that he felt he was hardly still living in the world he knew. And yet his whole tragedy, when it had to be put into words, was reduced to the single phrase: ‘Monseigneur, I married a daughter of the nobility.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Cardinal, ‘and what is her name?’

  ‘Marie de Cressay.’

  ‘Oh, Cressay; I don’t know it.’

  ‘But I had to marry her secretly, Monseigneur; her family were opposed to it.’

  ‘Because you’re a Lombard? Naturally; they’re still rather old-fashioned in France. In Italy, of course … So you wish to obtain an annulment? Well … if the marriage was secret …’

  ‘No, Monseigneur, I love her and she loves me,’ said Guccio. ‘But her family has discovered that she is with child, and her brothers have pursued me to try and kill me.’

  ‘They may do so, they have a customary right to do so. You have put yourself in the position of a ravisher. Who married you?’

  ‘Father Vicenzo.’

  ‘Fra Vicenzo? I don’t know him.’

  ‘The worst of it is, Monseigneur, that the priest is dead. So I can never prove that we are really married. But don’t think I’m a coward, Monseigneur; I wanted to fight. But my uncle went and asked the advice of Messire de Bouville …’

  ‘… who wisely advised you to go away for a time.’

  ‘But Marie is going to be shut up in a convent! Do you think, Monseigneur, that you will be able to get her out? Do you think I shall ever see her again?’

  ‘One thing at a time, my dear son,’ replied the Cardinal, still revolving his reading-desk. ‘A convent? What better place could she be in at the moment? You must trust in God’s infinite mercy, of which we all stand in such great need.’

  Guccio lowered his head with an exhausted air. His black hair was covered with dust.

  ‘Has your uncle good commercial relations with the Bardi?’ went on the Cardinal.

  ‘Indeed yes, Monseigneur. The Bardi are your bankers, I believe,’ replied Guccio with automatic politeness.

  ‘Yes, they are my bankers. But I find them less easy to deal with these days than they were in the past. They’ve become such an enormous concern! They have branches everywhere. And they have to refer to Florence for the smallest demand. They’re as slow as an Ecclesiastical Court. Has your uncle many prelates among his customers?’

  Guccio’s cares were far removed from the bank. The fog was growing thicker in his head; his eyelids were burning.

  ‘We have mostly the great barons,’ he said, ‘the Count of Valois, the Count of Artois. We should be greatly honoured, Monseigneur …’

  ‘We’ll talk of that later. For the moment you’re in the shelter of this monastery. You will pass for a man in my employ; perhaps we’ll make you wear a clerk’s robe. I’ll talk to my chaplain about it. You can take off that livery and go and sleep in peace; that appears to be what you need the most.’

  Guccio bowed, muttered a few words of gratitude and went to the door. Then, coming to a halt, he said: ‘I can’t undress yet, Monseigneur; I’ve got another message to deliver.’

  ‘To whom?’ asked Duèze somewhat suspiciously.

  ‘To the Count of Poitiers.’

  ‘Give me the letter; I’ll send it later by one of the brothers.’

  ‘But, Monseigneur, Messire de Bouville was very insistent …’

  ‘Do you know if the message concerns the Conclave?’

  ‘Oh, no, Monseigneur! It’s about the King’s death.’

  The Cardinal leapt from his chair.

  ‘King Louis is dead? But why didn’t you say so at once?’

  ‘Isn’t it known here? I thought you would have been informed, Monseigneur.’

  In fact, he wasn’t thinking at all. His misfortunes and his fatigue had made him forget this capital event. He had galloped all the way from Paris, changing horses in the monasteries whose names he had been given, eating hastily and talking as little as possible. Without knowing it, he had forestalled the official couriers.

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘That’s precisely what Messire de Bouville wants to tell the Count of Poitiers.’

  ‘Murder?’ whispered Duèze.

  ‘It seems the King was poisoned.’

  The Cardinal thought for a moment.

  ‘That may alter many things,’ he murmured. ‘Has a regent been appointed?’

  ‘I don’t know, Monseigneur. When I left, everyone was talking of the Count of Valois.’

  ‘All right, my dear son, go and rest.’

  ‘But, Monseigneur, what about the Count of Poitiers?’

  The prelate’s thin lips sketched a rapid sm
ile, which might have passed for an expression of goodwill.

  ‘It would not be prudent for you to show yourself; moreover, you’re dropping with fatigue,’ he said. ‘Give me the letter; and so that no one can reproach you, I’ll give it him myself.’

  A few minutes later, preceded by a linkman, as his dignity required, and followed by a secretary, the Cardinal in Curia left the Abbey of Ainay, between the Rhône and the Saône, and went out into the dark alleys, which were often made narrower still by heaps of filth. Thin and slight, he seemed to skip along, almost running in spite of his seventy-two years. His purple robe appeared to dance between the walls.

  The bells of the twenty churches and forty-two monasteries of Lyons rang for the first office. Distances were short in this city, which numbered barely twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom half were engaged in the commerce of religion and the other half in the religion of commerce. The Cardinal soon reached the house of the Consul, where lodged the Count of Poitiers.

  3

  The Gates of Lyons

  THE COUNT OF POITIERS was just finishing dressing when his chamberlain announced the Cardinal’s visit.

  Very tall, very thin, with a prominent nose, his hair lying across his forehead in short locks and falling in curls about his cheeks, his skin fresh as it may be at twenty-three, the young Prince, clothed in a dressing-gown of shot camocas, greeted Monseigneur Duèze, kissing his ring with deference.

  It would have been difficult to find a greater contrast, a more ironical dissimilarity than between these two figures, one like a ferret just emerged from its earth, the other like a heron stalking haughtily across the marshes.