death of King Louis VIII, Queen Blanche of Castile had assumed the regency, to the satisfaction of all.
‘Madame Blanche of Castile, and this was only whispered, was not as pure as the image that has been created of her. It appears that Count Thibaut of Champagne, who was a good friend of Messire my father’s, served her even in her bed …’
They had to let him talk. Though the Seneschal easily forgot what had happened the day before, he had a precise memory for the things he had been told as a small child. He had found an audience and was making the most of it. His hands, shaking with a senile trembling, clawed unceasingly at the silk of his robe over his knees.
‘And even when our sainted King left for the Crusade, where I was with him …’
‘The Queen resided in Paris during that time, did she not?’ interjected Charles of Valois.
‘Yes, yes …’ said the Seneschal.
Clémence was the first to give way.
‘Very well, Uncle, so be it!’ she said. ‘I will do as you wish and return to the Cité.’
‘Ah! A wise decision at last, which I am sure Messire de Joinville approves.’
‘Yes, yes …’
‘I shall go and take the necessary measures. Your escort will be under the command of my son, Philippe, and our cousin, Robert of Artois.’
‘Thank you, Uncle, thank you,’ said Clémence, on the verge of collapse. ‘But now, I ask you, please, let me pray.’
An hour later, the Count of Valois’s orders had set the Château of Vincennes in turmoil. Wagons were being brought out of the coach-house; whips were cracking on the cruppers of the great Percheron horses; servants were running to and fro; the archers had laid down their weapons to lend a hand to the stablemen. Since the King’s death they had all felt they should talk in low voices, but now everyone found an occasion to shout; and, if anyone had really wished to make an attempt on the Queen’s life, this would have been the very moment to choose.
Within the manor the upholsterers were taking down the hangings, removing the furniture, carrying out tables, dressers and chests. The officers of the Queen’s household and the ladies-in-waiting were busy packing. There was to be a first convoy of twenty vehicles, and doubtless they would have to make two journeys to complete the move.
Clémence of Hungary, in the long white robe to which she was not yet accustomed, went from room to room, escorted always by Bouville. There were dust, sweat and tumult everywhere, and that sense of pillage that goes with moving house. The Bursar, inventory in hand, was superintending the dispatch of the plate and valuables which had been collected together and now covered the whole floor of a room: dishes, ewers, the dozen silver-gilt goblets Louis had had made for Clémence, the great gold reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross, which was so heavy that the man carrying it staggered as if he were on his way to Calvary.
In the Queen’s chamber the first linen-maid, Eudeline, who had been the mistress of Louis X before his marriage to Marguerite, was in charge of packing the clothes.
‘What is the use of taking all these dresses, since they will never be of any use to me again?’ said Clémence.
And the jewels too, packed in heavy iron chests, the brooches, rings and precious stones Louis had lavished on her during the brief period of their marriage, were all henceforth useless objects. Even the three crowns, laden with emeralds, rubies and pearls, were too high and too ornate for a widow to wear. A simple circlet of gold with short lilies, placed over her veil, would be the only jewel to which she would ever have a right.
‘I have become a white Queen, as I saw my grandmother, Marie of Hungary, become,’ she thought. ‘But my grandmother was over sixty and had borne thirteen children. My husband will never even see his.’
‘Madame,’ asked Eudeline, ‘am I to come with you to the Palace? No one has given me orders.’
Clémence looked at the beautiful, fair woman who, forgetting all jealousy, had been of such great help to her during the last months and particularly during Louis’s illness. ‘He had a child by her, and he banished her, shut her up in a nunnery. Is that why Heaven has punished us?’ She felt laden with all the sins Louis had committed before he knew her, and that she was destined to redeem them by her suffering. She would have her whole life in which to pay God, with her tears, her prayers and her charity, the heavy price for Louis’s soul.
‘No,’ she murmured, ‘no, Eudeline, don’t come with me. Someone who loved him must remain here.’
Then, dismissing even Bouville, she took refuge in the only quiet room, the only room left undisturbed, the chamber in which her husband had died.
It was dark behind the drawn curtains. Clémence went and knelt by the bed, placing her lips against the brocade coverlet.
Suddenly she heard a nail scratching against cloth. She felt a terror which proved to her that she still had a will to live. For a moment she remained still, holding her breath, while the scratching went on behind her. Warily she turned her head. It was the Seneschal de Joinville, who had been put in a corner of the room to wait till it was time to leave.
The Cardinal who Did not Believe in Hell
THE JUNE NIGHT WAS beginning to grow pale; already in the east a thin grey streak low in the sky was the harbinger of the sun, soon to rise over the city of Lyons.
It was the hour when the wagons set out for the city, bringing fruit and vegetables from the neighbouring countryside; the hour when the owls fell silent and the sparrows had not yet begun to twitter. It was also the hour when Cardinal Jacques Duèze, behind the narrow windows of one of the apartments of honour in the Abbey of Ainay, thought about death.
The Cardinal had never had much need of sleep; and as he grew older he needed still less. Three hours of sleep were quite enough. A little after midnight he rose and sat at his desk. A man of quick intellect and prodigious knowledge, trained in all the intellectual disciplines, he had composed treatises on theology, law, medicine and alchemy which carried weight among the scholars and savants of his time.
In this period, when the great hope of poor and princes alike was the manufacture of gold, Duèze’s doctrines on the elixirs for the transmutation of metals were much referred to.
‘The materials from which elixirs can be made are three,’ could be read in his work entitled The Philosophers’ Elixir, ‘the seven metals, the seven spirits and other things … The seven metals are sun, moon, copper, tin, lead, iron, and quicksilver; the seven spirits are quicksilver, sulphur, sal-ammoniac, orpiment, tutty, magnesia, marcasite; and the other things are quicksilver, human blood, horses’s blood and urine, and human urine.’2
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.
