The Strangled Queen (6 page)

How Monseigneur of Valois would have liked to wear that crown himself! And he fussed about like one of those old spinsters who busy themselves pinning the dresses of brides.

As he listened, Abbot Egidius watched the young King who, once again, was shaken by his cough, and he thought, "Of course, every preparation
must be made; but will he last
till then?"

When the meal was over, Hugues
de Bouville, First Chamberlain to Philip the Fair, rose to break his carved wand before Louis X, signi
fying that he had accomplished
his ultimate office, Fat Bouville's eyes filled with tears, his hands trembled and he tried three times before he succeeded in breaking the wooden wand, the delegated counterpart of the great sceptre
of gold. Then he sat
down again next to young Mathieu de Trye, First Chamberlain to Louis, who was to succeed him. He murmured, "It's up to you now, Messire."

Everyone went out, mounted their horses, and the procession re-formed for the last lap. Outside there was but a thin cro
wd to cry, "Long live the King!
" The populace had got cold enough the day before, watching the great procession whose head had already reached Saint-Denis when its tail had not yet passed the Porte de Paris;
today's procession had nothing
exciting to offer. Sleet was falling, soaking through everyone's clothes to the skin; only the most ardent spectators remained, or those who could shout from their own doorsteps without getting wet.

From the time when he had first known that he would one day be King, Louis had dreamed of enterin
g his capital in glorious sun
shine. And when the Iron King, rebuking him, said harshly
, "Louis, don't be so stubborn!
" how often had he not wished that his father might die, thinking, "When I can command, everything will be different, and people will see what kind of a man I am."

But now he had been proclaimed King, and yet there seemed to be nothing to mark the fact that he had been suddenly transformed into a sovereign. If anything had altered, it was only that he felt himself weaker than yesterday, ill-assured in his new-found majesty, and thinking at every turn of his father whom he had so
little loved.

With lowered head and shaking shoulders, he pressed his horse on between empty fields where the stubbles showed above a carpet of snow; he seemed
to be leading the survivors of
a conquered army.

Thus they arrived at the outskirts and entered the gates. The people of the capital seemed no more enthusiastic than those of Saint-Denis. Besides, what reasons had they to demonstrate happiness? The early winter hindered communications and increased the death-rate. The last h
arvest had been extremely bad; food was scarce
and its, price continually, increasing. Famine
was in the
air. And the little that was known about the new King contained nothing to awaken hope;

He was considered stubborn and self-opinionated,
from whence derived
his nickname of "The Hutin," which from the Court had spread across the town. No one knew of a single great or generous action he had ever performed. He had only the sad reputation of a prince deceived by his wife, and who, once the scandal was discovered, had taken delight in torturing and then drowning in t
he Seine those of his household
servants whom he had believed to be accomplices of his misfortune.

"That's why they feel, contempt for me," Louis X said to himself. "Because of that bitch who tricked me and made me a laughing-stock before, the world. But they will be made to love me, and if they won't, I shall act so as to make them tremble at
sight of me
and hail me, when they see me,
as if they loved me
very much indeed. But the first thing I need is to take another wife, to have a queen beside me, so that my dishonour may be, effaced."

Alas, the report his cousin of Artois had given him the day before, upon his return from Chateau-Gaillard, appeared to make
this no easy matter. "The bitch will give way; I shall bully her, torture her into yielding."

Night had fallen and the archers of the escort held lighted torches. As it had been rumoured among the lower orders that pieces of silver would be thrown them, groups of the poor, their naked flesh showing through their rags, had gathered at street corners. But no coins fell.

Thus the melancholy torchlight procession, passing by the Chatelet and the Pont au Change, reached the Palace of the Cite.

With the support of an equerry's shoulder, Louis X dismounted, and the procession at once broke up. The Countess Mahaut gave the signal for dispersal, declaring that everyone needed warmth and rest, and that she was going to the Hotel d'Artois.

The prelates and lords took advantage of this to go off to their own houses. Even the brothers of the new King departed. So, upon entering his Palace, Louis X found himself abandoned by everyone but his escort of equerries and servants, his two uncles, Valois' and Evreux, Robert of Artois and Enguerrand de Marigny. They passed through the Mercers' Hall, '-immense and almost deserted at this hour. A few merchants,
8
padlocking their baskets after, a bad day's business, removed their
hats and gathered in a group
to cry, "Long live the King! Their voices sounded weak, lost among the vaults of the two enormous naves.

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 Merovee, had reigned over France. Phili
p the
Fair had erected th
em 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 adept 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 and
framing the monumental doorway, rose the two statues of Ph
ilip 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 gall
ery 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, turnin
g 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 pendi
ng
whi
ch 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 Cite. 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 Hotel 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 tour 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-Chappelle rang the evening angelus.

Suddenly a deep sigh, almost a groan, sounded from the da
rkest corner of the room; every
one 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
pier
cing
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 y
et 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 Hotel 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 recognise 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 Hotel 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 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."

Instinc
tively- 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! ''

"I know, Nephew, I
am thinking of nothing else," replied Valois, his brow wrinkled in thought.

Art
ois, standing face to face with
The Hut
in, whose forehead came up only
to his shoulder, said to him in a whisper that could have been heard twenty yards away, "If you are afraid of a celi
bate life, Cousin, I can always
furnish your bed with charming young females, whom the promise of a purse of gold and the vanity of pleasuring the King would render most agreeable to you."