The Hôtel-Dieu
THE HUGE WARD FOR men was like a cathedral nave. At the end of it was an altar where four masses, vespers, and evensong were celebrated every day. The privileged patients occupied little cells, called ‘rooms of consideration’, which lined the walls; the rest were lying two in a bed and head to foot. The monks, in long brown habits, were continuously passing up and down the centre aisle, either to sing the office, to attend to the sick or serve the meals. Religious exercises were intimately related to medical treatment; the groans of the sufferers were mingled with verses of the psalms; the odour of incense could not overcome the atrocious smell of fever and gangrene; death was a public spectacle. Inscriptions, painted in high gothic letters upon the walls, prepared the patient for death rather than recovery.4
For three weeks Guccio had lain there in a cell, gasping for breath in the appalling heat of summer, which always has a tendency to make illness more exhausting and hospitals more disagreeable. He looked sadly at the rays of the sun which entered by the windows pierced high in the wall and threw large golden patches upon this assembly of human desolation. He could make no movement without groaning; the balms and elixirs of the nursing brothers burnt him like so many flames, and every dressing was a time of torture. No one seemed to be able to tell him whether the bone was affected; but he felt sure that the wound was more than a flesh-wound, since he nearly fainted whenever they touched his thigh or the small of his back. The doctors and surgeons assured him that he was in no mortal danger, that at his age one recovered from anything, and that God had performed many another miracle, as He had for that caulker’s boy who had come in the other day, carrying his intestines in his hands, and who had left after a short time even gayer than before. Guccio despaired none the less. He had been there three weeks already and there seemed no reason to suppose he would not be there for another three, or even three months, or that he would not be lame and crippled for ever.
He saw himself condemned for the rest of his life to crouching huddled behind a money-changer’s counter in Marseilles because he could not make the journey to Paris. If, that was, he died from no other disease. Every morning he saw one or two corpses carried out. They had already turned a horrible black colour, since there were always, as in every Mediterranean port, a few cases of plague about. And all this because he had wished to show off by jumping on to the quay before his companions. And when he had just escaped shipwreck too!
He was furious at fate and his own stupidity. He sent for the letter-writer almost every day and dictated to him long letters for Marie de Cressay which he sent by the couriers of the Lombard banks to the branch at Neauphle, so that the chief clerk might give them secretly to the girl.
With all the emphasis and richness of image which Italians use in speaking of love, Guccio sent the most passionate declarations. He assured her he only wished to get well for her sake, for the happiness of seeing her again, looking upon her, and cherishing her day by day for ever. He besought her to be faithful to the pact they had sworn, and promised her enduring happiness. ‘You dominate my whole heart, as no one else will ever do, and if you should fail me, my life too would fail.’
Now that he was confined through his own stupidity to a bed in the Hôtel-Dieu, he was presumptuous enough to begin to doubt everyone and everything and to fear that the girl he loved was no longer waiting for him. Marie would grow tired of an absent lover, would fall for some young provincial squire, a huntsman and champion in tournaments.
‘My good luck,’ he said to himself, ‘was to have been the first to love her. But now it is a year and soon will be eighteen months since we kissed each other for the first time. She will reconsider the matter. My uncle warned me. What am I in the sight of a daughter of a noble house? A Lombard, that is to say a little more than a Jew, a little less than a Christian, and most certainly not a man of rank.’
As he contemplated his wasted, motionless legs, wondering whether he would ever be able to stand upon them again, he described in his letters to Marie de Cressay the wonderful life he would give her. He had become the friend and protégé of the new Queen of France. To read his letters one might have thought that it was he alone who had negotiated the King’s marriage. He told of his embassy to Naples, the storm, and how he had behaved in it, relating the courage of the crew. He attributed his accident to a chivalrous design; he had leapt forward to assist Princess Clémence and to save her from falling into the sea, when she was on the point of leaving the ship, which was, even in harbour, still tossed by waves.
Guccio had also written to his uncle Spinello Tolomei describing his misfortune, begging that the Neauphle branch be kept for him and asking for a credit with their Marseilles correspondent.
He had a number of visitors who distracted his mind a little and gave him a chance of complaining in company, which is more satisfying than complaining to oneself. The representative of the Tolomei Bank was assiduous in his attentions and arranged for better food than that supplied by the hospital brothers.
One afternoon Guccio had had the pleasure of seeing his friend Signor Boccaccio di Cellino, senior traveller of the Bardi company, who happened to be passing through Marseilles. Guccio had been able to unburden himself to him as much as he pleased.
‘Think of all I’ll miss,’ Guccio said. ‘I shall not be able to attend Donna Clemenza’s wedding, where I would have taken my place among the great lords. Having done so much to bring it about, it really is bad luck not being able to be there! And I shall also miss the coronation at Rheims. It’s really quite intolerable. And I’ve had no reply from my darling Marie.’
Boccaccio did his best to console him. Neauphle was not a suburb of Marseilles, and Guccio’s letters were not carried by royal couriers. They had to go by the usual Lombard stages, Avignon, Lyons, Troyes, and Paris; the couriers did not leave every day.
‘Boccacino, my dear friend,’ cried Guccio, ‘since you’re going to Paris, I beseech you, if you have the time, go to Neauphle and see Marie. Tell her all I’ve said! Find out if my letters have reached her safely; try and discover whether she still loves me. Don’t hide the truth from me, even if it’s unpalatable. Don’t you think, Boccacino, that I might travel in a litter?’
‘What, so that your wound can reopen, worms get into it, and that you may die of fever in some filthy inn upon the road? What an idea! Are you mad? Really, Guccio, you’re twenty now, after all.’
‘Not yet!’
‘All the more reason for staying where you are; what’s a month here or there at your age?’
‘If it happened to be the operative month, my whole life might be ruined.’
Princess Clémence sent one of her gentlemen every day to ask news of the invalid. Fat Bouville came three times himself to sit beside the young Italian’s bed. Bouville was overwhelmed with work and anxiety. He was doing his best to get the future Queen’s attendants properly fitted out before setting forth on the road to Paris. Exhausted by the voyage, some of the company had had to retire to bed. No one had any clothes but the soaked and spoiled garments they had been wearing when they disembarked. The gentlemen and ladies of the suite were placing orders with tailors and dressmakers without worrying about payment. The whole of the Princess’s trousseau, which had been lost at sea, was to be made again; silver, china, trunks, all the necessities of the road, which at the period formed the normal equipment for a royal personage’s journey, had to be bought again. Bouville had sent to Paris for funds; Paris had replied that Naples should be approached, since the loss had taken place during that part of the journey which was in the territorial waters of the Crown of Sicily. The Lombards had had to be brought into play. Tolomei had remitted
