‘He’s so weak, our little King, so weak!’ he said sadly.
‘Oh, no, Messire, he’s doing much better; look, he has almost caught up with mine. And the medicines they’re giving me, though they upset my stomach a little, seem to be doing him good.’29
Bouville extended his great hand, tanned by the reins of horses and the pommels of arms; he gently stroked the little head on which a fair down was forming.
‘He’s not a king like others, you know …’ he murmured.
Philip the Fair’s old servant did not know how to express what he felt. For as long as he could remember or, indeed, his father had been able to remember, the monarchy, the kingdom, France itself, all that had been the basis of his functions and the object of his anxieties, had been merged with a long and solid chain of strong and adult kings, who exacted devotion and dispensed honours.
For twenty years he had pushed forward the faldstool on which sat a monarch before whom Christendom trembled. Never could he have believed that the chain would be reduced so soon to this tiny pink link, its chin smeared with milk, a link one could break with one hand.
‘It’s true enough’, he said, ‘that he has made a good recovery; except for the mark left by the forceps, which is already disappearing, one would have to look closely to distinguish him from yours.’
‘Oh, no, Messire,’ said Marie; ‘mine is the heavier. Aren’t you, Jean the Second, much heavier?’
She immediately blushed and exclaimed: ‘Since they’re both called Jean, I call my Jean the Second. Perhaps I oughtn’t to.’
Bouville, with a gesture of automatic courtesy, stroked the second baby’s head. His eyes moved from one to the other.
Marie thought that the fat man’s gaze was attracted by her breasts, and she blushed the harder. ‘When shall I stop blushing on every possible occasion?’ she wondered. ‘There’s nothing immodest or provocative in giving a child the breast!’
At the moment Madame de Bouville came into the room, carrying the clothes for the King. Bouville took her aside and murmured: ‘I think I’ve found a means.’
For some moments they conversed in low voices. Madame de Bouville nodded her head, deep in thought; twice she looked towards Marie.
‘Ask her yourself,’ she said at last. ‘She doesn’t like me.’
Bouville returned to the young woman. ‘Marie, my child, you are going to render a great service to our little King to whom I see you are so attached,’ he said. ‘Here are the barons coming that he may be presented to them. But we fear the cold for him, because of the convulsions he was seized with at his christening. Imagine the effect it would have if he began writhing as he did the other day! It would soon be said that he cannot live, as his enemies are spreading it abroad. We barons are warriors, and we like the King to give proof of being robust even in his infancy. Your child is the stouter and looks the stronger. We would like to present him in the King’s place.’
Marie looked anxiously at Madame de Bouville, who said quickly: ‘This has nothing to do with me. It’s my husband’s idea.’
‘Wouldn’t it be a sin, Messire, to do a thing like that?’ Marie asked.
‘A sin, my child? But it’s a virtue to protect one’s king. And it would not be the first time that a healthy child was presented to the people in place of a weakly heir,’ Bouville assured her, lying in a good cause.
‘But won’t people notice?’
‘How should they?’ cried Madame de Bouville. ‘They’re both fair; and at that age all children are alike, and alter from day to day. Who really knows the King? Messire de Joinville, who can see nothing, the Regent, who sees but little more, and the Constable, who knows more about horses than he does about infants?’
‘Won’t the Countess of Artois be surprised that he has no marks of forceps?’
‘How could she see them under the bonnet and the crown?’
‘Besides, it’s a dull day. We shall almost have to light the candles,’ Bouville added, pointing to the window and the sad November sky.
Marie made no further objection. At bottom, the idea of this substitution did her honour and she attributed to Bouville nothing but good intentions. She took pleasure in dressing her child as a king, swaddling him in silk, placing about him the blue cloak strewn with golden lilies and the bonnet on which had been sewn a tiny crown, clothes prepared before his birth.
‘How beautiful my little Jean will be,’ Marie said. ‘Lord, a crown, a crown! You’ll have to give it back to your King, you know, you’ll have to give it back to him!’
She bounced her child up and down, as if he were a doll, before the cradle of Jean I.
‘Look, Sire, look at your foster-brother, your little servant who is to take your place so that you will not catch cold.’
And she thought: ‘Just imagine when I tell Guccio all this, when I tell him that his son is the King’s foster-brother and that he was presented to the barons! What a strange life we lead, a life that I would exchange for no other! How lucky it was I fell in love with him, my Lombard!’
Her happiness was destroyed by a long groan from the adjoining room.
‘My God, the Queen!’ thought Marie. ‘I had forgotten the Queen.’
An equerry entered the room, announcing the approach of the Regent and the barons. Madame de Bouville took up Marie’s child.
‘I’m taking him to the King’s room,’ she said, ‘and will put him back there after the ceremony till the Court has left. As for you, Marie, don’t move from here till I return, and if anyone should come, in spite of the guard we’re placing on the door, you must say that the child with you is yours.’
4
My Lords, Look on the King
THE BARONS HAD SOME difficulty in all crowding into the great hall; they were talking, coughing, stamping their feet and beginning to get impatient with having to stand so long. The escorts had invaded the corridors to see the spectacle; there were groups of heads in all the doorways.
The Seneschal de Joinville, who had been kept in bed until the last moment so as not to overtire him, was standing at the door of the King’s chamber with Bouville.
‘You must make the announcement, Messire Seneschal,’ said Bouville. ‘You are the oldest companion-in-arms of Saint Louis; the honour is yours by right.’
Ill with anxiety, his face running with sweat, Bouville was thinking: ‘I could not do it. I could not make the announcement. My voice would betray me.’
At the end of the dim corridor he saw the Countess Mahaut appear, gigantic, looking still larger in her coronet and heavy state mantle. Never had Mahaut of Artois seemed to him so huge and so terrifying.
He dashed into the room and said to his wife: ‘The moment has come.’
Madame de Bouville went to meet the Countess, whose heavy step rang on the flagstones, and handed her the light burden.
The place was dark; Mahaut did not look closely at the child. She merely thought that he had increased in weight since the day of the christening.
‘Ah, our little King is doing well,’ she said. ‘I compliment you, my dear.’
‘We watch over him very carefully, Madame; we do not wish to incur his godmother’s reproaches,’ replied Madame de Bouville, assuming her most polite manner.
‘It’s not before it was time,’ thought Mahaut; ‘he seems singularly healthy.’
She saw Bouville’s face in the light from a window.
‘What’s the matter with you that you’re sweating like that, Messire Hugues?’ she asked. ‘It can’t be from the heat.’
‘It’s due to all the fires I’ve had lit. Messire the Regent gave me little time to make all the necessary preparations.’
Their eyes met; it was a bad moment for both of them.
‘Let us move on,’ said Mahaut; ‘clear the way for me.’
Bouville gave his arm to the old Seneschal, and the two Curators moved slowly towards the great hall. Mahaut followed a few paces behind them. Now was the best opportunity and it might not occur again
. The slowness of the Seneschal’s advance permitted her to take her time. There were, indeed, equerries and ladies-in-waiting lining the walls, all gazing at the child in the dusk; but who would notice so brief and so natural a gesture?
‘Now then! We must look our best,’ said Mahaut to the crowned child she was holding in the crook of her arm. ‘We must do honour to the realm, and not dribble.’
She took her handkerchief from her purse and quickly wiped the little wet lips. Bouville turned his head; but the gesture was already accomplished, and Mahaut, concealing the handkerchief in the hollow of her hand, was pretending to arrange the child’s cloak.
‘We are ready,’ she said.
The doors of the hall were opened and silence fell. But the Seneschal could not see the crowd of faces before him.
‘Make the announcement, Messire, make the announcement,’ said Bouville.
‘What must I announce?’ asked Joinville.
‘The King, of course, the King!’
‘The King …’ murmured Joinville. ‘It’s the fifth King I shall have served, do you realize that?’
‘Of course, of course, but make the announcement,’ Bouville repeated nervously.
Mahaut, behind them, wiped the baby’s mouth a second time to make certain.
The Sire de Joinville, having cleared his throat with a number of rasping coughs, finally made up his mind to make the announcement. In a grave and reasonably steady voice he said: ‘My lords, look on the King! Look on the King, my lords!’
‘Long live the King!’ replied the barons, uttering the cry they had been denied since the burial of the Hutin.
Mahaut went straight to the Regent and to the members of the royal family gathered about him.
‘But he’s strong … he’s rosy … he’s fat,’ said the barons as she passed by.
‘What’s this people have been saying about his being a weakling and unlikely to live?’ murmured Charles of Valois to his son Philippe.
‘Oh, the family of France is always valiant,’ said La Marche in imitation of his uncle.
The Lombard’s child looked well, indeed too well, to Mahaut’s eyes. ‘Couldn’t he cry and writhe a little?’ she thought. And she secretly tried to pinch him through the cloak. But the swaddling clothes were thick, and the child only made a happy little gurgling sound. The spectacle presented to his blue eyes, so recently opened, seemed to please him. ‘The little wretch! He’ll start cooing in a minute. But he’ll be cooing less tonight, unless Béatrice’s powder has lost its virtue!’
There were shouts from the back of the hall: ‘We can’t see him; we want to admire him!’
‘Take him, Philippe,’ said Mahaut to her son-in-law, handing him the baby. ‘Your arms are longer than mine. Show the King to his vassals.’
The Regent took the little Jean by the body, and raised him high in the air so that everyone might see him. Suddenly Philippe felt a warm viscous liquid running over his hands. The child, seized with hiccups, was vomiting the milk it had sucked half an hour before, but the milk had become green and mixed with bile; his face had also become green, then quickly turned a dark, indefinable, alarming hue, while his neck twisted backwards.
There was a great cry of anguished disappointment from the crowd of barons.
‘Lord, Lord,’ cried Mahaut, ‘the convulsions have seized him again!’
‘Take him back,’ said Philippe quickly, placing the child in her arms as if it were a dangerous package.
‘I knew it!’ cried a voice.
It was Bouville. He had turned purple, and his eyes moved in anger between the Countess and the Regent.
‘Yes, you were right, Bouville,’ said the latter. ‘It was too early to present this sick child.’
‘I knew it!’ repeated Bouville.
But his wife pulled him quickly by the sleeve to prevent his committing an irreparable folly. Their eyes met and Bouville grew calmer. ‘What was I about to do? I’m mad,’ he thought. ‘We’ve got the real one.’
But if he had taken every possible step to see that the crime fell on another’s head, he had no plan ready to meet the case of the crime being actually committed. Mahaut, also, was taken aback by the speed with which it had happened. She had not expected the poison to act so quickly. She was uttering what she hoped were words of reassurance: ‘Be calm, be calm! We thought the other day also that he was going to die; and then, as you saw, he recovered all right. It’s a childish ailment, frightening to see, but it doesn’t last. The midwife! Someone go and fetch the midwife,’ she added, taking the risk in order to prove her good faith.
The Regent was holding his soiled hands away from his body; he was gazing at them with fear and disgust, and dared touch nothing with them.
The infant had turned blue and was suffocating. In the disorder and panic which followed no one very well knew what they were doing, nor what happened. Madame de Bouville rushed towards the Queen’s room, but having almost reached it, abruptly stopped, thinking: ‘If I call the midwife, she’ll see at once that the child has been changed, and that he has not got the marks of the forceps. Above all, above all, let no one take off his bonnet!’ She came running back, while the crowd were already moving towards the King’s room.
No midwife’s services were any longer of use to the child. Still wrapped in his lilied cloak, the tiny crown awry, he lay like a piece of jetsam, washed up on the huge silk coverlet of the bed. The whites of his eyes showing, his lips dark, his swaddling clothes defiled and his viscera destroyed, the infant, who had just been publicly presented as the King of France, had ceased to breathe.
5
A Lombard in Saint-Denis
‘AND NOW WHAT ARE we going to do?’ the Bouvilles asked each other.
They were hoist with their own petard.
The Regent had not lingered long at Vincennes. Assembling the members of the royal family, he had asked them to mount their horses and escort him to Paris in order to hold an immediate Council. At the very moment the Regent was leaving the manor, Bouville had had a last access of courage.
‘Monseigneur!’ he had cried, seizing the Regent’s mount by the bridle.
But Philippe had immediately cut him short.
‘Yes, yes, of course, Bouville; I am grateful to you for your sympathy in our affliction. We do not in any way blame you, you know that. It’s the law of human nature. I will send you my orders for the funeral.’
And the Regent had left, spurring into a gallop as soon as he had crossed the drawbridge. At the pace he set, those accompanying him would have little opportunity for reflection on the way.
Most of the barons had followed him. Only a few remained, the less important and the idle, who hung about in little groups, discussing the event.
‘You see,’ said Bouville to his wife, ‘I should have spoken out at once. Why did you prevent me?’
They were standing in a window-embrasure, whispering together, and hardly daring to confide their thoughts to each other.
‘The wet-nurse?’ went on Bouville.
‘I’ve seen to her. I took her to my own room, locked the door, and placed two men outside it.’
‘She suspects nothing?’
‘No.’
‘She’ll have to be told.’
‘Wait till everyone has gone.’
‘Oh, I ought to have spoken out!’ Bouville repeated.
Remorse at having failed to follow his immediate instinct tortured him. ‘If I had shouted the truth out in front of all the barons, if I had produced proof on the spot …’ But to do that he would have needed a character other than his own, needed to have been a man of the Constable’s stamp for instance, and, above all, would have needed to have no wife behind him to pull him by the sleeve.
‘But how could we know,’ said Madame de Bouville, ‘that Mahaut would do the deed so skilfully, and that the child would die before everyone’s eyes?’
‘We should in fact have done better,’ Bouville murmured, ‘to present the right one, and let fat
e take its course.’
‘Oh, and didn’t I say so!’
‘Indeed, yes, I admit you did. It was I who had the idea and it was a bad one.’
For now, who on earth would believe them? How and to whom could they declare that they had deceived the assembly of barons by placing the crown on the head of the wet-nurse’s child? Their action smacked of sacrilege.
‘Do you realize the risk we run now if we fail to keep silent?’ asked Madame de Bouville. ‘Mahaut will poison us next.’
‘The Regent was in concert with her; I’m sure of it. When he had wiped his hands, after the child had been sick over them, he threw the towel into the fire; I saw it. He would have us tried for committing a felony against Mahaut.’
From now on their greatest anxiety was to be for their own safety.
‘Have you washed the child?’ asked Bouville.
‘I have, with one of my women, while you were seeing the Regent off,’ replied Madame de Bouville. ‘And now four equerries are watching over him. There is nothing to be feared in that quarter.’
‘And the Queen?’
‘I’ve told everyone to say nothing to her so as not to aggravate her illness. In any case she is in no state to understand. And I have told the midwives not to leave her bedside.’
Shortly afterwards the chamberlain, Guillaume de Seriz, arrived from Paris to inform Bouville that the Regent had been recognized King by his uncle, his brother, and those peers present. The Council had been brief.
‘As regards his nephew’s funeral,’ said the chamberlain, ‘our Lord Philippe has decided that it shall take place as soon as possible, in order not to distress the people too long with this latest death. There will be no lying-in-state. As today is Friday, and a burial may not be held on a Sunday, the body will be taken to Saint-Denis tomorrow. The embalmer is on his way already. I’ll take my leave of you, Messire, for the King has commanded me to return as soon as possible.’
Bouville let him go without another word. ‘The King … the King …’ he kept muttering to himself.