The Royal Succession. Морис Дрюон
which are in a bad way; it will be a heavy task for the next successor to Saint Peter.’
The Count of Poitiers clasped his long hands together before his face and thought for a few seconds.
‘Do you think, Monseigneur,’ he asked, ‘that the Italians would agree to the Holy See remaining in Avignon in return for the satisfaction of not having a Gascon Pope, and that the Gascons, in return for the certainty of Avignon, would agree to renounce their own candidate and rally to your third party?’
By which he in fact meant: ‘If you, Monseigneur Duèze, became Pope with my support, would you formally agree to preserving the present residence of the papacy?’
Duèze perfectly understood.
‘It would, Monseigneur,’ he replied, ‘be the wise solution.’
‘I am grateful for your valuable advice,’ said Philippe of Poitiers, rising to his feet to put an end to the audience.
He showed the Cardinal out.
When two men, who to all seeming are utterly diverse in age, appearance, experience and position, recognize each other as of similar quality and believe that mutual collaboration and friendship are possible between them, it is due more to the mysterious conjunctions of destiny than to the words they may exchange.
When Philippe bowed to kiss his ring, the Cardinal murmured, ‘You would make an excellent regent, Monseigneur.’
Philippe straightened up. ‘Does he realize that I have been thinking all this time of nothing else?’ he wondered. And he replied: ‘Would you not yourself, Monseigneur, make an excellent Pope?’
And they could not help smiling discreetly to each other, the old man with a sort of paternal affection, the young man with friendly deference.
‘I will be beholden to you,’ Philippe added, ‘if you will keep secret the grave news you have brought me until it is publicly announced.’
‘I will do so, Monseigneur, in order to serve you.’
Left alone, the Count of Poitiers reflected only for a few seconds. Then he summoned his first chamberlain.
‘Adam Héron, has no courier arrived from Paris?’ he asked.
‘No, Monseigneur.’
‘Then close all the gates of Lyons.’
THAT MORNING THE PEOPLE of Lyons were without vegetables. The market-gardeners’ wagons had been stopped outside the walls, and the housewives were clamouring in the empty markets. The only bridge, that over the Saône (for the one over the Rhône had not yet been completed), was barred by soldiery. But if one could not enter Lyons, one could not leave it either. Italian merchants, travellers, itinerant friars, reinforced by loungers and idlers, gathered about the gates and demanded an explanation. The guard invariably replied: ‘The Count of Poitiers’s orders,’ with the distant and important air that agents of authority tend to adopt when executing an order they do not understand.
People were shouting:
‘But my daughter is ill at Fouvière …’
‘My barn at Saint-Just burned down yesterday at vespers …’
‘The bailiff of Villefranche will have me arrested if I don’t take him my poll-tax today …’
‘The Count of Poitiers’s orders!’
And when the crowd began to press forward, the royal sergeants-at-arms raised their maces.
There were strange rumours going round the town.
Some declared that there was going to be war. But with whom? No one could say. Others asserted that a bloody riot had taken place during the night near the Augustinian monastery between the King’s men and those of the Italian Cardinals. Horses had been heard going by. Even the number of the dead was mentioned. But at the Augustinians’ all was quiet.
The Archbishop, Pierre de Savoie, was very anxious, wondering whether the events which had taken place before 1312 were about to begin all over again and whether he would be compelled to abandon, to the advantage of the archbishopric of Sens, the primacy of the Gaules, the only prerogative he had succeeded in preserving when Lyons had been attached to the Crown.6 He had sent one of his canons for news; but the canon, having gone to the Count of Poitiers’s lodging, had been met by a curtly silent equerry. And now the Archbishop was expecting an ultimatum.
The Cardinals, who were lodged in various religious houses, were no less anxious and, indeed, inclined to panic. Were they to be treated as they had been at Carpentras? But how could they escape this time? Messengers rushed from the Augustinians to the Franciscans and from the Jacobins to the Carthusians. Cardinal Caetani had sent his general assistant, the Abbé Pierre, to Napoléon Orsini, to Albertini de Prato and to Flisco, the only Spaniard, with orders to say to those prelates: ‘Look what has happened! You let yourselves be persuaded by the Count of Poitiers. He swore not to molest us, that we should not even have to go into seclusion to vote, and that we should be completely free. And now he has shut us up in Lyons!’
Duèze himself received the visit of two of his Provençal colleagues, Cardinal de Mandagout and Bérenger Frédol, the elder. But Duèze pretended to have but just emerged from his theological studies and to know nothing. During this time, in a cell near the Cardinal’s apartment, Guccio Baglioni was sleeping like a log, in no state to speculate what might be the cause of all the panic.
For the last hour Messire Varay, Consul of Lyons,7 and three of his colleagues, who had come to ask for an explanation in the name of the City Council, had been kept waiting in the Count of Poitiers’s antechamber.
The Count was sitting in camera with the members of his entourage and the great officers who were part of his delegation.
At last the hangings parted and the Count of Poitiers appeared, followed by his councillors. They all wore the grave expressions of men who had just reached an important political decision.
‘Ah, Messire Varay, you have come at the right moment, and you too, Messires Consuls,’ said the Count of Poitiers. ‘We can give you at once the message we were about to send you. Messire Mille, will you be so good as to read it?’
Mille de Noyers, a jurist, a Councillor of Parliament and Marshal of the East under Philip the Fair, unrolled the parchment and read as follows:
“To all the Bailiffs, Seneschals, and Councils of loyal towns. We would have you know the great sorrow that has befallen us by the death of our well-beloved brother, the King, our Lord Louis X, whom God has removed from the affection of his subjects. But human nature is such that no one may outlive the term assigned him. Thus we have decided to dry our tears, to pray with you to Christ for his soul, and to show ourselves assiduous for the government of the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of Navarre that their rights may not perish, and that the subjects of these two kingdoms may live happily beneath the buckler of justice and of peace.
“The Regent of the two Kingdoms, by the Grace of God.
PHILIPPE”
When they had recovered from their astonishment, Messire Varay immediately came forward and kissed the Count of Poitiers’s hand; then the other Consuls unhesitatingly followed suit.
The King was dead. The news was so surprising in itself that no one thought, for several minutes at least, of questioning it. In the absence of an heir who was of age, it seemed perfectly normal that the elder of the sovereign’s brothers should assume power. The Consuls did not