The Tuscan is never pleased with anything or anybody, except himself. Disparagement is the breath of life to him. In this Giannino was very much a Tuscan. He and Guidarelli were still busy criticizing the world in general when they reached Viterbo.
Why, for instance, was the Pope reigning in Avignon instead of in Rome, as Saint Peter had intended? Why were French popes always elected like this Pierre Roger, former Bishop of Arras, who had succeeded Benedict XII and was now reigning under the name of Clement VI? And why did he always appoint French cardinals and refuse to return to Italy? God had punished them all. During a single summer seven thousand houses had been shut up in Avignon; corpses were being picked up by the wagon-load. Then the scourge had moved north into the districts exhausted by the war. The plague had reached Paris where it had killed a thousand people a day, sparing no one, the great no more than the humble. The Duke of Normandy’s wife, who was the daughter of the King of Bohemia, had died of the plague. Queen Jeanne of Navarre had died of the plague. Even the Queen of France herself, Jeanne the Lame, had died of the plague; and the French, who hated her, said that her death was a just punishment for her crimes.
But why had Giovanna Baglioni, Giannino’s first wife, Giovanna whose neck was like the shaft of an alabaster column and whose eyes were like almonds, been carried off by it? Was that justice? Was it fair that the epidemic should have devastated Siena? God really showed very little discernment and too often taxed the good to pay for the sins of the wicked.
How lucky some people were to have escaped the plague! Messer Boccaccio, for instance, the son of a friend of the Tolomei, whose mother had been French like Giannino’s, had taken refuge in a fine Florentine villa as the guest of a rich lord. During the period of the epidemic, to amuse the refugees in the Villa Palmieri and help them to forget that death was at their gates, Boccaccio had written those delightfully entertaining stories the whole of Italy was now repeating. Had not Count Palmieri and Messer Boccaccio shown more courage in the face of death than those idiotic French knights? Notary Guidarelli was certainly of that opinion.
King Philippe had remarried only thirty days after the death of the wicked Queen. Giannino criticized him, not exactly for having married again, since he had done so himself, but for his indecent haste. Thirty days! And whom had Philippe VI chosen? This was where the story gained relish. He had carried off his eldest son’s fiancée, for the son was a widower too and was intending to marry his Cousin Blanche, daughter of the King of Navarre, who was nicknamed Belle Sagesse.
On this girl of eighteen appearing at Court, Philippe had been so dazzled by her that he had at once made advances. Jean of Normandy had had to give her up to his father and submit to being married to the Countess of Boulogne, a widow of twenty-four, for whom he showed no great liking – not, indeed, that he showed much liking for any woman, his tastes being directed more towards the pages.
The King, who was now fifty-six, seemed to have regained all the ardour of youth in the arms of Belle Sagesse. Beautiful and chaste – how well the name became her! Giannino and Guidarelli shook with laughter as they rode along. Really, Messer Boccaccio might well have put her into one of his tales. Within three months the wench had killed off the jousting King, and the ineffable fool, who during the third of a century he had reigned had reduced his realm from wealth to ruin, was taken to Saint-Denis.
Jean II, the new King, who was now thirty-six and called the Good, though no one quite knew why, appeared from what travellers reported to have qualities as outstanding as those of his father and to be blessed with a similar good fortune in his undertakings. He was merely perhaps a trifle more extravagant, futile and unstable; and to these traits he seemed to have added by inheritance his mother’s cruelty and hypocrisy. Believing that he was beset by treason, he had already beheaded his constable.
When in Calais, which he had recently captured, King Edward III had instituted the Order of the Garter, on the occasion of his having himself fastened the stocking of the beautiful Countess of Salisbury with whom he was in love. King Jean II, determined not to be outdone in chivalry, immediately founded the Order of the Etoile to honour his Spanish favourite, young Charles de la Cerda. But that was as far as his prowess went.
The people were starving; both agriculture and industry were short of labour owing to the war and the Black Death; food was scarce and prices were continually rising; trades were being forced out of existence; and a tax of one sol in the livre had been imposed on all transactions.
Errant bands, similar to the pastoureaux of the past, but more demented still, were roaming over the country; thousands of ragged men and women flagellated each other with cords and chains as they sang lugubrious psalms along the roads; and then, suddenly seized with crazy fury, turned inevitably to massacring the Jews and the Italians.
And yet the Court of France still displayed an insolent luxury, and spent on a single tournament money enough to feed the poor of a whole county for a year; while the courtiers dressed in a far from Christian manner, the men adorning themselves with more jewels than the women, and wearing narrow-waisted tunics so short that they revealed the buttocks, and shoes with such immensely long points to the toes that they impeded their wearer in walking.
Could a sensible banking company lend money or supply wool to such people? Clearly not. And Giannino Baglioni, as he entered Rome, on October 2nd, by the Ponte Malvio, was determined to tell the Tribune Cola di Rienzi so.
2.
The Night at the Capitol
THE TRAVELLERS WENT TO an osteria in the Campo dei Fiori; it was the hour at which the flower-sellers were disposing of their bunches of roses at reduced prices and starting to free the square of their fragrant, multi-coloured stalls.
When night began to fall, Giannino Baglioni set out for the Capitol taking the innkeeper as guide.
What a marvellous city Rome was! This was his first visit to it, and he regretted that he had not the time to stand and stare at every step he took. It was so huge compared to Siena and Florence, larger so it seemed to him – if his vague memories were correct – even than Paris. It was certainly more crowded and lively than Lyons, which he had visited in the past. The maze-like alleys would open suddenly on to some splendid palace, its courts and porches bright with torches and lanterns. Boys strolled singing, arm in arm across the streets. But there was much good-humoured jostling, and everyone smiled at foreigners; there were innumerable taverns and from them came the delicious odours of hot oil, saffron, frying fish and roasting meat. Life here did not stop at nightfall.
Giannino climbed the Capitoline hill by the light of the stars. There was grass sprouting in front of a church porch; fallen columns and a statue holding up a mutilated arm bore witness to Imperial Rome.
Cola di Rienzi was at supper with a numerous company in a great hall that had been raised on the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter. Giannino had Cola di Rienzi pointed out to him, went to him, fell on one knee and introduced himself. The Tribune immediately took him by the hand and raised him. Then he had him conducted to a neighbouring room, where he joined him a few minutes later.
Rienzi had assumed the title of Tribune, but in face and bearing he was more like an emperor. Purple was his colour and he draped his robe about him like a toga. The collar of his robe enclosed a bull-neck; there was a massive quality about his face; and he had large bright eyes, short hair and a firm chin. Indeed, he might well have found a place among the busts of the Caesars. The Tribune had a slight nervous tic, a quivering of the right nostril, which made him look impatient. There was authority in his step, and it was clear, even on first sight, that he was born to command. He had great plans for the improvement of his people’s lot; and there could be no doubt that it would be wise both to understand and conform to his ideas. He made Giannino sit down beside him and told the servants to close the doors and see they were not disturbed. He at once began asking questions that had nothing whatever to do with the banking business.
He was not interes
ted in the wool trade, money-lending, or bills of exchange. It was Giannino himself, Giannino in his own right, in whom he was interested. How old had Giannino been when he came from France? Where had he spent his early years? Who had brought him up? Had he always borne the same name? And, after each question, Rienzi waited for the answer, listened, nodded and began questioning him again.
So Giannino had been born, or so he had been told, in a convent in Paris. His mother, Marie de Cressay, had brought him up till he was nine, in the Ile-de-France, near a village called Neauphle-le-Vieux. Did he know whether his mother had ever been at the Court of France? Yes, she had spent a short time there. Giannino remembered what his father, Guccio, had told him of it; having given birth to him, Marie de Cressay had been summoned to the Court as wet-nurse to Queen Clémence of Hungary’s child; but she had stayed there only a very short time, since the Queen’s child had died almost at once, poisoned so it was said.
Giannino smiled. He had been foster-brother to a king of France; but he scarcely ever thought of it and now it suddenly seemed an incredible, almost laughable thing to have happened in the tranquil life of a citizen of Siena who was approaching his forties.
But why was Rienzi asking him all these questions? Why was the Tribune, the bastard of the Emperor before last, gazing at him so attentively out of his wide bright eyes?
‘It’s you,’ said Cola di Rienzi. ‘It’s most certainly you!’
Giannino had no idea what he meant by this remark. He was even more surprised when the imposing Tribune went down on his knees and kissed his right foot.
‘You are the King of France,’ Rienzi said, ‘and this is how everyone must treat you from now on.’
The lights seemed to waver a little before Giannino’s eyes.
When the house in which you are peacefully dining suddenly collapses in an earthquake, or the ship in which you are sleeping suddenly hits a reef, for a moment or two you are necessarily at a loss to grasp what has happened.
Giannino Baglioni was sitting in a room in the Capitol, and the master of Rome was kneeling at his feet, assuring him that he was the King of France!
‘Marie de Cressay died nine years ago last June.’
‘You mean my mother’s dead?’ cried Giannino.
‘Yes, my most gracious lord, the woman you thought to be your mother is dead. But before dying she confessed.’
It was the first time that anyone had called Giannino ‘most gracious lord’ and he sat there with his mouth hanging open, more surprised at it even than at having his foot kissed.
When Marie de Cressay knew she was dying, it appeared that she had summoned to her bedside an Augustine monk from a neighbouring monastery, Brother Jourdain d’Espagne, and had made her confession to him.
Giannino was recollecting his earliest memories. He could see the room at Cressay and his fair and beautiful mother. And so she had been dead nine years, and he had not known it! She must have died in 1345. And now, so it appeared, she had not been his mother at all.
Brother Jourdain, at the dying woman’s request, had put her confession down in writing. It was the revelation of a most extraordinary State secret and of a no less extraordinary crime.
‘I shall show you the confession, together with Brother Jourdain’s letter; they are both in my possession,’ said Cola di Rienzi.
The Tribune talked for four hours and more. No less was required to instruct Giannino in those events of forty years ago which formed part of the history of the Kingdom of France: the death of Marguerite of Burgundy, and King Louis X’s second marriage with Clémence of Hungary.
‘My father was part of the embassy that went to fetch the Queen of Naples; he often told me about it,’ Giannino said. ‘He was a member of the suite of a certain Count de Bouville.’
‘The Count de Bouville, did you say? It all fits in. Bouville was Curator of Queen Clémence’s stomach, and she was your mother, my most gracious lord; and it was he who sent for the Dame de Cressay to the convent, where she had just been brought to bed, so that she might be your wet-nurse. Of all this she gave a detailed account.’
As the Tribune went on talking, Giannino felt as if he were losing his reason. The whole world seemed topsy-turvy; shadows were turning bright, and day into night. He continually asked Rienzi to repeat things, as if to revise some over-complicated arithmetical calculation. He was not the foster-brother of a king of France, who had died in the cradle; it was the foster-brother who had died. He was learning all at once that his father was not his father, that his mother was not his mother and that his real father, a king of France, had murdered his first wife, only to be later murdered himself. Was it that man’s memory he must venerate from now on?
‘You were always called Jean, weren’t you? The Queen, your mother, gave you that name because of a vow. Jean or Giovanni, of which the diminutives are Giovannino or Giannino … You are Jean I, the Posthumous.’
The Posthumous! A sinister name, one of those words that were redolent of the cemetery, and which no Tuscan could hear without warding off the evil eye with his left hand.
And then, one after the other, Count Robert of Artois, Countess Mahaut, and all the other names which had appeared in his father’s reminiscences – no, not his father’s, the other man’s, Guccio Baglioni’s – played their terrible parts in the Tribune’s story. Countess Mahaut, who had poisoned Giannino’s father – yes, that was right, King Louis – had then murdered the newborn child.
But the Count de Bouville had prudently exchanged the Queen’s child for the wet-nurse’s, who was also called Jean. It was he who had died, and the son of a Sienese merchant had been buried at Saint-Denis.
Giannino felt very uncomfortable indeed, because he could not help thinking of himself as Giannino Baglioni, the son of the Sienese merchant; it was rather as if he were being told that he had died at the age of five days and that the whole of his life since then had been a figment; his body, his memories and his family mere illusion. He was become his own ghost. This night at the Capitol was a nightmare!
‘She sometimes called me: “My little prince”, when we were alone,’ Giannino murmured.
‘Who did?’
‘My mother – I mean to say the Dame de Cressay. I thought it was merely an ordinary term of endearment French mothers used towards their children; and she used to kiss my hands and weep. Oh, how it all comes back to me! The allowance the Count de Bouville used to send; and how the Cressay uncles, the bearded one and the other, were so much nicer to me on the days the money arrived.’
What had happened to them all? No doubt most of them had long been dead: Mahaut, Bouville, Robert of Artois. And the Cressay brothers had been knighted on the eve of the Battle of Crécy, simply because King Philippe VI had made a pun on their name.
‘They must be quite old now, too.’
And if Marie de Cressay had always refused to see Guccio Baglioni again, it was therefore not because she hated him, as he had so bitterly imagined, but in order to keep the oath she had been almost physically compelled to take, when the little King had been handed over to her.
‘And for fear of reprisals, both to herself and to her husband,’ Cola di Rienzi explained; ‘for they had been married, properly though secretly, by a monk. She confirmed it in her confession. And then, when you were nine years old, Baglioni came and took you away.’
‘Did she never marry again?’
‘Never.’
‘Poor woman! What an appalling life. He never married again either.’
Giannino looked thoughtful for a moment. He was trying to think of the woman who had died at Cressay and the man who had died in Campania as foster-parents.
‘Could I have a mirror?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Of course,’ the Tribune said in some surprise.
He clapped his hands and gave the order to a servant.
‘I saw Queen Clémence once; it was when my father had taken me from Cressay and I was spending a few days in Paris at Uncle Spinello’s. My father ?
?? my foster-father, I should say – was very proud of having known her and took me to see her. He wanted to give me something to remember. She gave me sugared almonds. She was very beautiful. And so she was my real mother?’
He suddenly felt much moved. He put his hand into his robe and brought out a little reliquary he wore round his neck on a silk cord. ‘This relic of Saint John came from her.’
He was trying desperately to remember exactly how the Queen had looked to him as a child. He recalled the gesture with which she had absent-mindedly placed her beautiful hand on his head. And he had not known it was his mother’s hand! She had been dressed entirely in white, as were all widowed queens. And she had died without ever knowing that her only son was alive.
What a ruthless criminal the Countess Mahaut must have been to assassinate an innocent newborn child and create such havoc and distress in the lives of so many people.
Giannino’s feeling of his own unreality had now disappeared to give place to a sensation of being two people at once, which was just as unnerving. He was both himself and another, the son of a Sienese banker and the son of the King of France.
And what of his wife, Francesca? He suddenly thought of her. Whom had she married? And what of his children? It seemed that they were the descendants of Hugues Capet, Saint Louis and Philip the Fair.
‘Pope John XXII must have got wind of this business,’ Cola di Rienzi went on. ‘It has been reported to me that certain cardinals in his entourage were whispering at one time that he had doubts about the death of King Louis’ son. People thought it a mere rumour like so many others. Indeed no one really believed it till your foster-mother – your wet-nurse – made her confession in extremis. She extracted a promise from the Augustine monk to seek you out and to tell you the truth. Throughout her life she obeyed men’s orders to keep silence; but at the moment she was to appear before God, and since those who had imposed this silence on her had died without relieving her of her vow, she felt the need to share the secret.’