The Iron King (31 page)
Bending over Nogaret, a doctor looked down upon this body which was still imperceptibly struggling against an excommunication from which he had long ago been relieved.
‘Pope Clement … the Chevalier Guillaume de Nogaret … King Philip.’
As Nogaret’s lips feebly articulated the words, the echo of the Grand Master’s voice suddenly burst upon his mind.
‘I am burning,’ he said again.
At four o’clock in the morning, the Bishop of Paris came to administer the last sacraments to the Keeper of the Seals. It was a simple ceremony. A prayer was said above the prostrate body, those present knelt, trembling with fatigue and unreasoning fear.
The Bishop remained a moment in prayer at the foot of the bed. Nogaret was motionless, sunk among his sheets as if already a heavy stone were resting upon him. The Bishop departed, and it seemed that all was over; the doctor went up to the bed; Nogaret was still alive.
The windows grew grey in the faint light of dawn, and an insistent bell rang out across the Seine from beyond the end of the world. The old servant opened a window, greedily breathing in the fresh air. Paris smelled of springtime and new leaves. The city was awakening to a subdued clamour.
The patient was heard to murmur, ‘Have pity!’
When they looked round, Nogaret was dead and a trickle of blood was already drying at his nostrils. The doctor said, ‘God has taken him!’
Then the old servant went and took from Master Engelbert’s last delivery two long white candles which he placed in a candelabra and moved near the bed to light the last vigil of the Keeper of the Seals of France.
H
ARDLY HAD THE
K
EEPER
of the Seals given up the ghost, when Messire Alain de Pareilles, in the name of the King, entered Nogaret’s house to seize all the documents, papers and dossiers. He had every chest and drawer opened. The few drawers of which Nogaret had kept the key in some secret place were forced.
In an hour’s time, Alain de Pareilles had returned to the palace with a mass of archives, papers, parchments and tablets which, upon the order of Hugues de Bouville, were placed in the middle of the great oak table filling one whole side of the royal study.
Then the King himself came to pay a last visit to Nogaret. He remained but a short time before the body. He prayed silently. His eyes never for a moment left the face of the dead man, as if he still had one last question to ask him who had shared all his secrets and had served him so well.
Returning to the palace, Philip the Fair, followed by three sergeants-at-arms, appeared somewhat bowed as he walked. In the clear morning, servants were calling the citizens to the public baths. Life in Paris was beginning again and carefree children were already chasing each other through the streets.
Philip the Fair crossed the Mercers’ Hall and re-entered the palace. He at once set himself, with the assistance of Maillard, his private secretary, to examine the documents which had been brought from Nogaret’s house. The sudden disappearance of the Keeper of the Seals left many important matters pending.
At seven o’clock Enguerrand de Marigny came to see the King. The two men looked at each other in silence while the secretary retired.
‘The Pope,’ the King said curtly, ‘and now Nogaret …’
There was concern, even distress in his voice as he said the words. Marigny went to the table and took the chair the sovereign indicated. For a moment he remained silent, then he said, ‘Well, these are but strange coincidences, Sire, that is all! Similar things happen every day, but we are not concerned about them because they do not come to our notice.’
‘We are getting older, Marigny.’
He was forty-six years of age, and Marigny was forty-nine. Comparatively few men, at that period, reached their fiftieth year.
‘We shall have to look into all this,’ the King went on, indicating the papers.
And, without saying anything more, they both devoted themselves to the business of selecting what should be destroyed, classifying what Marigny should preserve, or what should be handed to the various legal advisers.
There was silence in the King’s study, hardly disturbed by the distant cries of the street-sellers, the rumour of workaday Paris. The King’s pale forehead was bent over the open files of which the most important were bound in leather bindings bearing Nogaret’s cipher. Philip saw the whole of his reign pass before his eyes, twenty-nine years in which he had held the fate of millions of men in his hands, and imposed his influence upon the whole of Europe.
And suddenly this whole series of events seemed remote from his true life, his real destiny. Everything suddenly appeared to him in a new light with strange shadows.
He was discovering what others thought and wrote about him, he saw himself from outside. Nogaret had kept reports from agents, the minutes of interrogations, letters, even police records. From all these lines of written words arose a picture of the King which he himself could not recognise, the picture of someone distant, hard, a stranger to the hardships of mankind, inaccessible to pity. Astonished, he read a couple of sentences written by Bernard de Saisset, the Bishop whose revolt had unleashed the quarrel with Boniface VIII. There were two cold and terrible phrases: ‘He may well be the most handsome man in the world, but he knows only how to look at people in silence. He is not a man, nor a beast; he is a statue.’
And there were also these words written by another witness of his reign: ‘Nothing will make him bend, he is an Iron King.’
‘An Iron King,’ murmured Philip the Fair. ‘Have I so successfully concealed my weaknesses? How little others know us, and how wrongly judged I shall be!’
Suddenly, seeing a written name, he remembered an extraordinary embassy which he had received at the very beginning of his reign. Rabban Kaumas, a Chinese Nestorian Bishop, had come to France, sent by the Great Khan of Persia, the descendant of Gengis Khan, in order to suggest an alliance to the King of France, and war against the Turks with an army of a hundred thousand men.
At that time Philip the Fair was twenty years old. How wonderfully seductive to a young man had seemed this dream of a crusade, a crusade in which Europe and Asia would participate; what an enterprise worthy of Alexander! Nevertheless, on that day, he had chosen a different road. No more crusades, no more warlike adventures; it was to France and to peace that he wished to devote all his efforts. Had he been right? How strong would France be, had he accepted the Khan of Persia’s alliance? For one moment he dreamed of a gigantic reconquest of the Christian territories which would have carried his glory far down the centuries. … Then he returned to reality and selected a new pile of dusty parchments.
Suddenly his shoulders appeared to become bowed. It was simply the matter of a date – 1305! It was the year of the death of his wife Jeanne, who had brought Navarre to the kingdom, and to him the only love of his life. He had never wanted any other woman; and since she had died nine years ago he had looked at none other and would never do so. He had recovered from the sorrow of his widowhood only to enter upon the uprising of 1306 in which, in the face of Paris rioting because of his Orders in Council about currency, he had had to take refuge in the Temple. The following year he had arrested those who had taken him in and defended him. The depositions of the Templars were preserved here, in huge rolls of parchment whose fastenings had been sealed by Nogaret. The King did not open them.
And now? Like so many others, Nogaret’s face had lost the light and warmth which gave it life. His indefatigable mind, his strength of will, his tough and exalted spirit, were all effaced. Only his work remained. For Nogaret’s life had not been that of a man who, behind his official position, bequeaths those small, sorrowfully intimate memorials that people leave behind them and which are so often ignored by the heedlessness of others. Nogaret was indeed exactly as he appeared. He had identified his life with the life of the kingdom. His secrets were all here, written into the evidence of his labour.
‘How many forgotten things are here,’ thought the King. ‘So many prosecutions, so much torture, so many tears. A river of blood … and all for what? What earth has been nourished by it all?’
His eyes unblinking, he was lost in thought.
‘And all for what?’ the King asked himself once more. ‘To what end? Where are my victories? Never a thing that is sure to live after me.’
He felt the great need to act which men feel when assailed by the idea of their own death, and the total negation which lies in wait for them, as if the world had never existed.
Marigny remained still, disquieted by the King’s gravity. Most things in his continually increasing work, in his responsibilities and honours came easily to him, except the understanding of his Sovereign’s silences. He was never certain of judging them aright.
‘We made Boniface canonise King Louis,’ Philip the Fair said suddenly in a low voice, ‘but was he really a saint?’
‘It was useful to the kingdom, Sire,’ replied Marigny.
‘But was it necessary, afterwards, to use force against Boniface?’
‘He was on the point of excommunicating you, Sire, because you were not putting the policies he desired into practice in your kingdom. You have not failed in the duty of kings. You have remained in the place God designed for you, and you have publicly proclaimed that you hold your kingdom from no one but God himself.’
Philip the Fair indicated one of the rolls of parchment. ‘And the Jews? Have we not burnt rather too many of them? They are human beings, mortal and capable of suffering as we are. God did not order that.’
‘Messire Saint Louis, Sire, hated them, and the kingdom had need of their wealth.’
The kingdom, the kingdom, every action was justified by the kingdom. ‘We had to do this or that because of the kingdom … We must do this because of the kingdom …’
‘Messire Saint Louis loved the Faith and the greatness of God! But what have I loved?’ said Philip the Fair in a low voice.
‘Justice,’ said Marigny. ‘The justice which is necessary for the common good and overtakes all those who diverge from the tendency of the world.’
‘Those who have diverged from the tendency of the world have been very numerous throughout my reign, and they will continue to be numerous if one century resembles another.’
He picked up Nogaret’s dossiers and let them fall back on the table, one after another.
‘Power is a bitter thing,’ he said.
‘Nothing is great that has not its bitter side,’ replied Marigny, ‘and Christ knew it. You have reigned in the grand manner. Think merely that you have united under the crown Chartres, Beaugency, Champagne, Bigorre, Angoulême, Marche, Douai, Montpellier, Franche-Comté, Lyons, and part of Guyenne. You have fortified your cities, as your father, Monsieur Philippe III wished, so that they should no longer be at the mercy of foreigners. You have remade the laws in accordance with the law of ancient Rome. You have remodelled Parliament so that it may be in a position to make sounder laws. You have conferred upon many of your subjects the
bourgeoisie du roi
.
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You have enfranchised the serfs of many bailiwicks and seneschalships. No, Sire, you are in error if you fear having done wrong. From a kingdom torn by dissension you have built a country which begins to beat with a single heart.’
Philip the Fair rose. The impregnable conviction of his Coadjutor reassured him, and he leant upon it in order to fight a weakness which was not truly natural to him.
‘You may be right, Enguerrand. But if you are satisfied with the past, what do you say of the present? Yesterday a crowd had to be dispersed in the rue Saint-Merri by the archers. Read what the Governors of Champagne, Lyons and Orleans write to me. There are outcries and complaints all over the country about the rising cost of wheat and the lowness of wages. And those who complain, Enguerrand, will never know that what they demand and what I should like to give them depend upon time and not upon my will. They will forget my victories in order to remember my taxes, and I shall be accused of not having fed them throughout their lives.’
Marigny listened, more disquieted now by the King’s words than by his silences. He had never heard him talk so much, nor admit to such uncertainty, nor show such discouragement.
‘Sire,’ he said, ‘we must decide several matters.’
Philip the Fair gazed once more upon the documents of his reign spread over the table. Then he straightened up, as if he had given himself an order to forget the pain and blood of human beings, and to become a king once more.
‘Yes, Enguerrand,’ he said, ‘we must.’