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?’
He 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
