The Strangled Queen (5 page)

"Yes, but so long as there is no Pope, nothing can be done without my agreement."

"You're foolish to be so obstinate."

He went and sat next to her, placed his huge hand as gently as he could about her neck and began, to stroke her shoulder.

Marguerite seemed troubled by the contact of his huge muscular hand. It was so long since she had felt a man's hand upon
her sk
in
.

"Why, should you be so interested in my accepting?" she asked.

He bent
low enough
over her to brush her hair with his lips.

"I am very fond of you,
Marguerite;
I always have been very fond of you, as you know very well. And now our interests are bound u
p together. You must succeed in
regaining your freedom. And I must give Louis cause for satisfaction, so that I may enjoy his favour. You can see very well, that we must be allies.

While speaking, he had put his, hand deep into the collar of the Queen of France's shirt and
was, stroking her bosom.
She made no resistance. On the contrary, she leant her head against her cousin's heavy
wrist and seemed to
abandon herself to him.

"Is it not a pity," went on Robert, "that so beautiful a body, so soft and comely, should be deprived of the pleasures of the flesh? Accept, Marguerite, and I will take you far from this prison this very day; I shall lead you fir
st to some well-endowed convent
where I can visit you frequently and watch over you. What can, it really matter to you to declare that your daughter is not Louis's,
since you have never loved the child? She raised wary eyes to him an
d said
these appalling words:

"If I don't love her, is not that certain proof that she is my hus
band's daughter?
"

For a moment she seemed to be dreaming, her eyes gazing upwards. The logs shifted on the hearth, lighting up
the room with a great fountain
of sparks. And Marguerite suddenly began to laugh, revealing her little white teeth; her mouth was all pink inside like a cat's.

"Why are you laughing?" asked Robert.

"Because of the ceiling," she replied, "I have just noticed that
it is like the ceiling of the Tower of Nesle."

Artois rose in stupefaction. He couldn't help feeling a certain
admiration for so much cynicism joined to so much
cunning. "My God, what a woman!
" he thought.

She watched him as he stood enormous; in front of the fire, planted on his legs solid as trunks of trees. The flames shone on his red boots, glinted
on the
gold of his spurs and the silver of his belt. If his capacity for desire were in proportion to the rest of him, there would be enough to atone for all the regrets of seven months' seclusion
.

He raised her up and' pulled her to him.

"Ah, Cousin," he said, "if only you had married me, or had chosen me as your lover instead of that young fool of an equerry, things would not have turned out for you as they have, and we would have been very happy."

"Of course," she murmured.

He held her by the waist, and he had the impression that the moment was near when she would cease to be able to think.

"It is not too late, Marguerite," he said softly.

"Perhaps
not," she replied in a hoarse, consenting voice.

"Let's get rid of this letter now, so that we need have no concern but ourselves. Let's tell
the Chaplain, who
is waiting below, to come up."

She started away from him.

"Waiting below, did you say?" she cried, her eyes bright with anger. "Oh, Cousin, do you think I am
such a fool
as all that?
You
have
behaved towards me as whores normally do towards men, arousing their sensuality the better to bend them to their will. But you forget that in that line women are better than men, and you are no more than an apprentice."

Angry, tensely upright, she defied him and re-knotted the collar of her shirt.

He tried to persuade her that
she had misunderstood him, that
he wanted nothing but her good, that their conversation had taken an unexpected turn, that he had suddenly remembered the poor priest freezing at the bottom of the staircase.

She looked at him with scorn and irony. He picked her up, though she did her best to defend herself, and carried her roug
hly
to

the bed.

"No, I shall not sign," she cried, fighting against him. "You can rape me if you like, because you are too strong for me to be able to resist you, but I shall tell
the Chaplain, I shall tell Ber
sumee, I shall let Marigny know what sort of ambassador you are and how you have taken advantage of me."

Furiously angr
y, he let her go, restraining
himself from slapping her face as he felt inclined to do.

"Never, do you see," she went on, "will you get me to admit that my daughter is not Louis's, for should Louis die, which I hope he does with all my heart, my daughter would become Queen of France, and then people would have to take some, account of me as Queen Mother."

For a moment Artois remained silent in astonishment. "What
she says makes sense, the clever bitch," he said to himself, "and
if by chance fate should prove her right ..." He was checkmated.
"It's
an unlikely chance," he replied all the same. "I have no other, so I shall hang on to it." "As you will, Cousin," he said, going to the door.

His double failure made him extremely angry. He went down
the stairs, found the Chaplain waiting for him, chilled to the bone,
a bunch of goose-quills in his hand.

"Monseigneur," said the Priest, "you won't forget to say, to Brother Renaud ..."

"Yes," shouted Artois, "I'll tell him that you're an ass, my fine fellow; I don't know where t
he hell you manage to find weaknesses in your penitents!
"

Then he called, "Escort! To horse!"

Bersumee arrived, still wearing the helmet which had not left his head since morning.

"What are my orders, Monseigneur?" he asked. "What, your orders? Obey those you already have." "And my furniture?"

"I don't care a damn about your furniture."

Artois's great Norman horse was already being led out to him, and Lormet held the stirrup ready.

"And who will pay for the food, Monseigneur?" asked Bersumee.

"You will get it from Messire de Marig
ny! Go and lower the drawbridge!
"

Artois hoisted himself athletically into the saddle and set off at a mad
gallop, followed
by his whole escort.

Soon in the falling
darkness nothing-was to
be seen upon the slopes of Chateau-Gaillard but the sparks struck by the horses' shoes.

4.
Long Live the King!

THE flames of
thousands of topers arranged in
clusters against the
pillars, threw their wavering light upon the effigies of the Kings of France; ever and again the long stone faces seemed to assume the mobile expressiveness of a dream world, and one might have thought that an army of knights was sleeping an enchanted sleep in the middle of a flaming forest.

In the
basilica
of Saint-Denis, the royal necropolis, the Court was attending the burial of Philip the Fair.

Drawn up side by side in the central nave, facing the new tomb, the whole Capet tribe were present in sombre and sumptuous mourning: the princes of the blood, the lay peers, the ecclesiastical peers, the members of the Inner Council, the Grand Almoners, the High Constable, indeed all the principal dignitaries of the Crown.

The Lord Chamberlain,
followed
by five officers of the household, advanced with solemn tread to the edg
e of the open vault into which
the body had already been lowered, threw into the cavity the carved wand which was the insignia of his office, and pronounced the formula which officially marked the change of reign: "The King is dead! Long live the King! "

After him, all present repeated "The King is dead! Long live the King! "

And the cry from a hundred throats resounded from bay and arch and pillar and re-echoed among the high vaults.

The Prince with the lack-lustre eyes, narrow shoulders and hollow chest who, at this moment, had become Louis X, felt a curious sensation in the nape of his neck, as if stars were bursting there. His whole body was seized by an agonising chill and he was afraid of falling down in a swoon. He began to pray for himself, as he had never prayed for anyone in the world.

On his right hand his two brothers, Philippe, Count of Poitiers, and Prince Charles, who had
riot as
yet acquired a territorial estate, gazed fixedly at the tomb, their hearts constricted by the emotion every man must feel, be he child of poverty or king's son, at the moment his father's body is lowered into the earth.

On the left of the new
Sovereign were his two uncles,
Mon
seigneur Charles
of Valois and Monseigneur Louis of Evreux, both big men who had already passed their fortieth year.

The Count of Evreux was a prey to memories of the past. "Twenty-nine years ago," he thought, "we too were three sons standing upon these same stones before our father's tomb. It seems such a little while ago; and now Philip has gone. Life is already over."

His eyes turned to the nearest effigy, which was that of King Philip III. "Father," prayed: Louis of Evreux with all his heart, "receive my brother Philip kindly into the other kingdom, for he succeeded you well.

Further along, near the altar, was
the tomb of Saint Louis, and, beyond again the stone effigies of
the great ancestors. And then,
on the other side
of the nave, the empty
spaces, bare flagstones which one day would open for this young man who was succeeding to the throne, and after him, reign
upon reign, for all the
kings of the future. "There is still room for many centuries of them," thought Louis of Evreux.

Monseigneur of Valois, his arms crossed, his chip held high, his eyes restless, observed all that was going on, watching to see that the ceremony was properly conducted.

"The King is dead! Long live the King! "

Five times more the cry sounded through the basilica as the chamberlains passed by. Then the last wand rebounded from the coffin and silence fell.

At that moment Louis X was seized with a violent fit of coughing that he was quite unable to control. A flux of blood mounted to his checks and for a long
moment he was shaken; by a par
oxysm, as if he were about to spit his soul out before his father's grave.

All those present looked at each other, mitre bent towards mitre, crown towards crown; there were whispers of anxiety and pity. Everyone was thinking, "Supposing he too were to die within a few weeks, what
would happen then
?"

Among the peers of France the redoubtable Countess Mahaut of Artois, her face red from the cold, watched her giant nephew Robert, and wondered why he had arrived at Notre-Dame
the
day before only in the middle of the funeral mass, unshaven and muddied to the waist. Where had he come from, what had he been doing? As soon as Robert appeared, there was intrigue in the air. The favour in which he seemed to stand, si
nce Philip the Fair had died a
few days ago, did nothing to reassure the Countess. And she was thinking that if the new King should catch a bad chill while burying his father, her affairs would come to fruition all
the quicker.

Surrounded by the justiciars of the Council, Monseigneur Enguerrand de Marigny, Coadjutor of the Sovereign they were burying, and Rector-General of the kingdom, wore a
princely mourning.
From time to
time
he exchanged glances with his younger brother, Jean de Marigny, Archbishop of Sens, who had officiated the day before at Notre-Dame and now, mitre on head, crozier in hand, was surrounded by the high clergy of the capital.

For two middle-class Normans who, twenty years earlier, called themselves simply the brothers Le Portier, they had had prodigious careers and, the elder ever pushing the younger upwards, succeeded in sharing power successfully between them, one controlling the civil power, the other the ecclesiastical. Between them they had destroyed the Order of the Knights Templar.

Enguerrand de Marigny was one of those rare men who have the certainty of being part of history while still alive
, because they have made it. An
d he needed to remember where he had started,
and to what heights he had risen, in order at this moment to be able to bear the great sorrow which had come to him. "Sire Philip, my King," he thought as he gazed at the coffin, "I served you as well as I knew how, and you confided to me the highest tasks, as you conferred upon
me the greatest honours and in
numerable gifts. How many days did we work side by side? We thought alike in everything; we made mistakes, and we corrected; them. I swear that I shall defend the work we accomplished together and shall pursue it against those who are now making ready to destroy it. But how lonely I shall feel! " For this great politician had fervour,, and he thought, of the kingdom as might a second king.

Egidius de Chambly, Abbot of Saint-Denis, on his, knees at the edge of the vault, made a last sign of the Cross. Then he rose to his feet, signalled to the sextons, and the heavy flat stone rolled into place above the tomb.

Never again would Louis
X hear his father's terrible voice saying, "Be quiet, Louis!

And far from being relieved, he was seized with panic. He heard a voice beside him say, "Come on,
Louis!'

He started
it was Charles of Valois who had spoken, telling; him to, move forward. Louis X turned towards his uncle and murmured, "You saw him become King. What did he say? What did, he do?"

"He entered upon his responsibilities without hesitation," replied Charles of Valois.

"He was eighteen, seven years younger than I am," thought' Louis X.' Feeling everyone's eyes upon him, he did his best to stand upright, and began to walk forward while the, procession formed behind
him, monks, their heads bent,
hands in sleeve
s, singing a psalm. Since they
had been singing continuously for twenty-four hours, their voices were beginning to grow hoarse.

Thus they went from the basilica to the chapter house of the Abbey, where was laid the traditional repast which closed the funeral ceremony.

"Sire," said Abbot Egidius, le
ading Louis to his place, "we
shall say two prayers from now on, one for the King God has taken from us, the other for him whom He has given us."

"Thank you, Father," said Louis X in an uncertain voice.

Then he sat down with a tired sigh and at once asked for a cup of water which he swallowed at one gulp. During the whole meal he remained silent, eating nothing, drinking a great deal of water. He felt feverish, physically and mentally ill.

"One must be robust to be a king." It was one of the maxims Philip the Fair used to his sons when, before they were knights, they used sometimes to grumble at the exercises of arms or at the quintaine "One must be robust to be a king," Louis X
repeated to
himself during these first moments of his reign. He was one of those people whom fatigue makes irritable, and he thought irritably that when one is bequeathed a throne, one should also be bequeathed the necessary strength to sit upright; on it. But who, unless he had the strength of an athlete, could have borne the past week without feeling exhausted?

That which precedent demanded of a new sovereign, as he assumed his post, was utterly inhuman. Louis had had to attend his father's deathbed, receive the transmission o
f the royal miraculous powers,
countersign the last will and
testament,
and take his meals for two days beside the embalmed corpse.
Then
had followed the transportation of the body by wa
ter from Fontainebleu to Paris,
a whole series of progresses and vigils, interminable religious services and processions, all in the most appalling winter weather, paddling in frozen mud, a sullen wind taking your breath away, sleet pricking your face.'

But Louis X admired his uncle of Valois who, throughout these days, had been constantly at his side, making every decision,
solving questions of precedent, indefatigably, helpfully,
terribly present. "Without him,
what
should I have done," thought Louis.

It was Valois who seemed to have the sinews of a king. Already, talking to the Abbot of Saint-Denis, he was beginning to express concern about Louis's coronation, which could not take place till the following summer, for the Abbot of Saint-Denis had, besides the guardianship of the royal tombs, the keeping of the banner of
France, which was brought out when the King went to war, and the guardianship of the instruments and vestments of coronation. The Count of Valois wished to know whether all was in order: was the great mantle in need of repair? Were the caskets for transporting the sceptre, the spurs and the hand of justice to Rheims in good condition? And the gold crown? It was essential that the goldsmiths should measure Louis X's head as soon as possible in order to alter the crown to the right size.