The Strangled Queen

The Hutin moved slowly forward, his legs stiff in his too-heavy boots, his body hot with fever. He looked to right and left where, against the walls, were arranged awe-inspiring statues of the forty kings who, since Mérovée, had reigned over France. Philip the Fair had erected them at the entrance to the royal abode, so that the living sovereign might appear in a spectator’s eye to be the continuation of a sacred race, designed by God for the exercise of power.

This colossal heritage in stone, white-eyed under the glow of the torches, dismayed still further the poor Prince of flesh and blood upon whom the succession had descended.

A merchant said to his wife, ‘Our new King doesn’t look much of a chap.’ The merchant’s wife, as she stopped blowing upon her fingers, replied with that peculiar sneer women so often adopt towards the victims of misfortune that can come from no one but themselves, ‘He certainly looks a proper cuckold.’

She did not speak over-loud, but her shrill voice resounded in the silence. The Hutin turned about with a start, his face suddenly aglow, vainly trying to see who had dared pronounce that word as he passed. Everyone about him looked away, pretending not to have heard.

They reached the foot of the Grand Staircase. Dominating, framing the monumental doorway, rose the two statues of Philip the Fair and Enguerrand de Marigny, for the Rector-General of the kingdom had received the supreme honour of seeing his likeness placed in the gallery of history in his lifetime, a pair to his master’s.

If there was anyone who hated the sight of that statue, it was Monseigneur of Valois. Whenever he had to pass by it, he raged with fury that a man of such mean birth should have been raised up so high. ‘Cunning and intrigue have lent him such effrontery that he assumes all the airs of being of our blood,’ thought Valois. ‘But it’s all very fine, Messire; we’ll bring you down from that pedestal, I promise you. We’ll show you pretty quick that the period of your meretricious greatness is over.’

‘Messire Enguerrand,’ he said, turning haughtily towards his enemy, ‘I think the King desires only the company of his family.’

By the word ‘family’, he meant only Monseigneur of Evreux, Robert of Artois and himself.

Marigny pretended not to have understood and, addressing himself to the King, in order to avoid a scene and at the same time to signify clearly that he proposed taking no orders but his, said, ‘Sire, there are many matters pending which require my attention. May I be permitted to withdraw?’

Louis was thinking of something else; the word uttered by the merchant’s wife was still ringing in his head. He would have been incapable of repeating what Marigny had just said.

‘Certainly, Messire, certainly,’ he replied impatiently. And he mounted the stairs which led to his apartments.

5

The Princess in Naples

DURING THE LAST YEARS of his reign, Philip the Fair had entirely rebuilt the Palace of the Cité. This careful man, who was almost miserly in his personal spending, knew no limits when it was a matter of glorifying the idea of royalty. The Palace was huge, overawing, and a sort of pendant to Notre-Dame: on the one side was the House of God, on the other the House of the King. The interior still looked new; it was all very sumptuous and rather dull.

‘My Palace,’ Louis X said, to himself, looking about him. He had not stayed there since its rebuilding, living as he did in the Hôtel de Nesle which had come to him, as had the crown of Navarre, through his mother. He began surveying the apartments which he now saw with a new eye because they were his.

He opened doors, passed through huge rooms in which his footsteps echoed: the Throne Room, the Justice Room, the Council Room. Behind him Charles of Valois, Louis of Evreux, Robert of Artois, and the Chamberlain, Mathieu de Trye walked in silence. Footmen passed silently through the corridors, secretaries disappeared into the staircases; but no voices were heard; everyone still behaved as at a death vigil. From the windows the glass of the Sainte-Chapelle could be seen glowing faintly through the night.

At last Louis X stopped in the room of modest proportions in which his father had normally worked. A fire, big enough to roast an ox, burnt there, but it was possible to keep warm while protected from the direct heat of the flames by dampened osier screens set around the hearth. Louis asked Mathieu de Trye to have dry clothes brought him; he took off his robe, placing it upon one of the screens. His uncles and his cousin Artois followed his example. Soon the heavy cloth, wet from the rain, the velvets, the furs, the embroideries, began to steam while the four men in their shirts and trunk-hose, like four peasants come home from the fields, stood there, turning about in the warmth.

The room was lit by a cluster of candles burning in a triangular stand of wrought-iron. The bell of the Sainte-Chapelle rang the evening angelus.

Suddenly a deep sigh, almost a groan, sounded from the darkest corner of the room; everyone started, and Louis X could not help crying out in a sharp voice, ‘What’s that?’

Mathieu de Trye entered, followed by a valet bringing Louis a dry robe. The valet went down on all fours and pulled from under a piece of furniture a big greyhound with a high curved backbone and a fierce eye.

‘Come, Lombard, come here.’

It was Philip the Fair’s favourite pet, present of the banker Tolomei, the same dog that had been found near the King when he had fallen motionless during his last hunt.

‘Four days ago this hound was at Fontainebleu, how has he managed to get here?’ asked The Hutin furiously.

An equerry was called.

‘He came with the rest of the pack, Sire,’ explained the equerry, ‘and he will not obey; he runs away at the sound of a voice and I have been wondering since yesterday where he had hidden himself.’

Louis ordered that Lombard should be taken away and shut up in the stables; and, as the big greyhound resisted, scraping the floor with its claws, he chased it out with kicks.

He had hated dogs since the day when, as a child, he had been bitten by one as he was amusing himself piercing its ear with a nail.

Voices were heard in a neighbouring room, a door opened and a little girl of three appeared, awkward in her mourning robe, pushed forward by her nurse who was saying, ‘Go on, Madame Jeanne; go and kiss Messire the King, your father.’

Everyone turned towards the little figure with pale cheeks and too-big eyes, who had not yet reached the age of reasoning but was, for the moment, the heiress to the throne of France.

Jeanne had the round, protruding forehead of Marguerite of Burgundy, but her complexion and her hair were fair. She came forward looking about her at people and things with the anxious expression of an unloved child.

Louis X stopped her with a gesture.

‘Why has she been brought here?’ he cried. ‘I don’t want to see her. Take her back at once to the Hôtel de Nesle; that’s where she must live, because it’s there …’

He was going to say, ‘… that her mother conceived her in her illicit pleasures.’ He stopped himself in time, and waited till the nurse had taken the child away.

‘I don’t want ever to see the bastard again!’ he said.

‘Are you really certain that she is one, Louis?’ asked Monseigneur of Evreux, moving his clothes away from the fire to prevent their scorching.

‘It’s enough for me that there is a doubt,’ replied The Hutin, ‘and I refuse to recognize the progeny of a woman who has shamed me.’

‘All the same, the child is fair-haired, as we all are.’

‘Philippe d’Aunay was fair too,’ replied The Hutin bitterly.

‘Louis must have good reasons, Brother, to speak as he does,’ said Charles of Valois.

‘What’s more,’ Louis went on, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I don’t ever again want to hear the word that was thrown at me as we passed through the hall; I don’t want to go on imagining all the time that people are thinking it; I don’t want ever again to give people the chance of thinking it.’

Monseigneur of Evreux was silent. He was thinking of the little girl who must live among a few servants in the deserted immensity of the Hôtel de Nesle. He heard Louis say, ‘Oh, how lonely I shall be here!’

Louis of Evreux looked at him, surprised as always by this nephew of his who gave way to every impulse of his mood, who preserved resentments as a miser keeps his gold, chased dogs away because he had once been bitten, his daughter because he had once been deceived, and then complained of his solitude.

‘If he had had a better nature and a kinder heart,’ he thought, ‘perhaps his wife would have loved him.’

‘Every living man is alone, Louis,’ he said gravely. ‘Each one of us in his loneliness undergoes the moment of recognition of sin, and it is mere vanity to believe that there are not moments like this in life. Even the body of the wife with whom we sleep remains a stranger to us; even the children we have conceived are strangers. Doubtless the Creator has willed it thus so that we may each of us have no communion but with Him and with each other but through Him. There is no help but in compassion and in the knowledge that others suffer as we do.’

The Hutin shrugged his shoulders. Had Uncle Evreux never anything to offer as consolation but God, and as a remedy but charity?

‘Yes, yes, you are doubtless right, Uncle,’ he said. ‘But that is no answer to the cares that oppress me.’

Then, turning to Artois who, his backside to the fire, was steaming like a soup-tureen, he said, ‘So you’re certain, Robert, that she will not yield?’

Artois shook his head.

‘Sire, Cousin, as I told you last night, I pressed Madame Marguerite in every way in my power: I gave her the most convincing arguments,’ replied Artois, with an irony which was valid only for himself. ‘I ran up against such a hard core of refusal that I can assure you with certainty there is nothing to be got from her. Do you know what she’s counting on?’ he added perfidiously. ‘She is hoping that you will die before her.’

Instinctively Louis X touched through his shirt the little reliquary he wore about his neck, and for a moment turned away, wild of eye, his hair in disorder. Then, speaking to the Count of Valois, he said, ‘Well, Uncle, you see it’s not all as simple as you promised, and it seems that my annulment is not to be had tomorrow!’