Читать книгу The Royal Succession - Морис Дрюон - Страница 16

ON A MORNING EARLY in July, well before dawn, Jean de Cressay entered his sister’s room. The large young man carried a smoking candle; he had washed his beard and was wearing his best riding-cloak.

‘Get up, Marie,’ he said. ‘You’re leaving this morning. Pierre and I are going to take you.’

The girl sat up in bed.

‘Leave? What do you mean? Have I got to leave this morning?’

Her mind was still hazy from sleep and she stared in incomprehension at her brother out of her huge dark blue eyes. She automatically shook back over her shoulders her long thick, silky hair, in which there were golden lights.

Jean de Cressay looked at his sister’s beauty without pleasure, as if it were a sin.

‘Pack up your clothes, for you won’t be coming back for a long time.’

‘But where are you taking me?’ asked Marie.

‘You’ll see.’

‘But why did you not say anything about it yesterday?’

‘What, so that you might still have time to play another trick on us? Come on, hurry up; I want to get started before our serfs see us. You’ve brought us shame enough; there’s no point in giving them more cause for gossip.’

Marie did not reply. For the last month her family had treated her like this and spoken to her in this tone of voice. She got up, feeling the weight of her five months’ pregnancy which, though still light, always surprised her when she rose in the morning. By the light of the candle Jean had left her, she made ready, washed her face and neck and quickly tied up her hair; she noticed that her hands were trembling. Where were they taking her? To what convent? She placed about her neck the gold reliquary Guccio had given her, which had come, so he had said, from Queen Clémence. ‘Up to now the relics have not been much protection,’ she thought. ‘Have I not prayed to them enough?’ She packed an overdress, a few underdresses, a surcoat and some towels for washing.

‘You’ll wear your cloak with the big hood,’ Jean said, as he looked into her room for a moment.

‘But I shall die of heat!’ said Marie. ‘It’s a winter cloak.’

‘Your mother wishes you to travel with your face hidden. Do as you’re told and hurry.’

In the courtyard the second brother, Pierre, was saddling the two horses himself.

Marie had known that this day was bound to come; in one way, however sad she felt at heart, she was not altogether sorry; at moments she had even looked forward to this departure. The most austere of convents would be more tolerable than the constant complaints and reproaches to which she had been subjected. At least she would be alone with her misfortune. She would no longer have to bear the anger of her mother, who had been bedridden from a stroke ever since the scandal had broken, and who cursed her daughter every time Marie brought her an infusion of herbs. They had had to summon urgently the surgeon-barber of Neauphle to draw a pint of dark blood from the stout lady of the manor. Dame Eliabel had been bled six times in less than a fortnight, but the treatment did not appear to be accelerating her return to health.

Marie was treated by her two brothers, particularly by Jean, as a criminal. Oh, rather the cloister a thousand times over! But would she ever be able to get news of Guccio in the convent? That was her obsession, her greatest fear at the fate awaiting her. Her wicked brothers had told her that Guccio had fled abroad.

‘They don’t want to admit it,’ she thought, ‘but they have had him put in prison. It’s not possible, simply not possible, that he has deserted me! Or perhaps he has returned to the country to save me; and that is why they are in such a hurry to take me away; and then they’ll kill him. Why did I not agree to go away with him? I refused to listen to him so as not to wound my mother and my brothers, and now the worst has befallen me as a result of trying to do right.’

Her imagination conjured up every possible form of disaster. There were moments when she even hoped that Guccio had really fled, leaving her to her fate. With no one from whom to ask advice or even compassion, she had no company but her unborn child; but that life was not yet of much help to her, except for the courage with which it inspired her.

At the moment of leaving, Marie de Cressay asked if she could say goodbye to her mother. Pierre went up to Dame Eliabel’s room, but there issued from it such a shouting on the part of the widow, whose voice appeared but little affected by the bleedings, that Marie realized it was useless. Pierre came down again, his face sad, his hands spread wide in a gesture of impotence.

‘She said that she no longer had a daughter,’ he said.

And Marie thought once again: ‘I should have done better to run away with Guccio. It’s all my fault. I should have gone with him.’

The two brothers mounted their horses and Jean de Cressay took his sister up on the crupper, because his horse was the better of the two, or rather the less bad. Pierre was riding the broken-winded nag, whose nostrils made a roaring sound, and on which, the previous month, the two brothers had made so distinguished an entry into the capital.

Marie cast a final glance at the little manor she had never left since she was born and which now, in the half-light of the uncertain dawn, already seemed to be clothed in a grey mist of memory. Every moment of her life, since she had first opened her eyes, was contained within these walls and in this countryside: her childish games, the surprising daily discovery of herself and of the world, which every human being makes in his turn, the infinite diversity of plants in the fields, the strange shapes of flowers, the marvellous pollen in their hearts, the softness of the down on young ducks’ breasts and the play of sunlight on dragonflies’ wings. She was leaving all those hours she had spent in watching herself grow, listening to her dreams, every stage of her changing face that she had so often admired in the clear waters of the Mauldre, and also that great joy at being alive she had sometimes felt when she lay full length on her back in the middle of a field, looking for omens in the shapes of the clouds and imagining God in the depths of the sky. She passed by the chapel, where her father lay beneath a stone flag and where the Italian monk had married her secretly to Guccio.

‘Lower your hood,’ her brother Jean ordered.

As soon as they had crossed the river, he hastened his horse’s pace, and Pierre’s began roaring at once.

‘Jean, aren’t we going rather too fast?’ said Pierre, indicating Marie with a jerk of the head.

‘To hell with it! Bad seed’s always solidly sown,’ replied the elder, as if he hoped wickedly for an accident.

But his hopes were disappointed. Marie was a strong girl and made for motherhood. She rode the twenty-five miles from Neauphle to Paris without showing any signs of weakness. She was bruised and suffocating with heat, but did not complain. From under her hood she saw nothing of Paris but the surface of the streets, the bottoms of the houses and headless people. What legs! What shoes! She would have liked to raise her hood but dared not. What surprised her most was the noise, the immense rumbling of the city, the voices of the street-hawkers selling every kind of ware, the noises made by the various trades; in certain alleys the crowd was so dense that the horses could hardly force their way through. Passers-by jostled Marie’s legs; but at length the horses came to a halt. She dismounted, feeling tired and dusty; she was allowed to raise her hood.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, gazing in surprise at the courtyard of a fine house.

‘At your Lombard’s uncle’s house,’ replied Jean de Cressay.

A few moments later Messer Tolomei, one eye shut and the other open, gazed at the three children of the late Sire de Cressay as they sat in a row before him, Jean bearded, Pierre clean-shaven, and their sister beside them, a little withdrawn, her head bowed.

‘You understand, Messer Tolomei,’ said Jean, ‘that you made us a promise.’

‘Of course, of course,’ replied Tolomei, ‘and I’m going to keep it, my friends, have no fear.’

‘You understand that it must be kept quickly. You understand that after all the gossip there has been about her shame, our sister can no longer live with us. You understand that we no longer dare appear in our neighbours’ houses, that even our serfs mock us as we go by, and that it will be worse still when our sister’s sin becomes more apparent.’

Tolomei had a reply on the tip of his tongue: ‘But, my lads, it’s you who have caused all the scandal! No one compelled you to pursue Guccio like madmen, rousing the whole town of Neauphle and announcing the mishap more publicly than if it had been cried by the town-crier.’

‘And our mother is not recovering from our misfortune; she has cursed her daughter, and seeing Marie near renews her anger until we fear she may die of it. You understand …’

‘This idiot, like everyone who asks you to understand, can’t have much sense in his head. When he has had his say he’ll stop. But what I do very well understand,’ the banker said to himself, ‘is why Guccio is mad about this pretty girl. Till now I thought he was wrong, but I’ve changed my opinion since she came into the room; and if my age would still let me, I’ve no doubt that I should behave more foolishly than he has done. Beautiful eyes, beautiful hair, beautiful skin – a true spring flower. And how bravely she bears her misfortunes; really, they both make such a fuss you might think it was they who had been ravished. But, poor child, her suffering is greater than theirs. She must surely have a nice nature. What bad luck to have been born under the same roof as these two oafs, and how I should like Guccio to be able to marry her openly so she could live here and rejoice my old age with the sight of her.’

He did not stop looking at her. Marie raised her eyes to him, lowered them at once, then raised them again, troubled at what he might be thinking of her and by his insistent gaze.

‘You understand, Messer, that your nephew …’

‘Oh, I disown him, I’ve disinherited him! If he had not fled to Italy, I think I’d have killed him with my own hands. If I could only find out where he’s hiding …’ said Tolomei, taking his forehead in his hands with an air of dejection.

But through the little chink between his hands, allowing no one but the girl to see, he twice raised the heavy eyelid which normally he kept closed. Marie realized that she had an ally and could not restrain a sigh. Guccio was alive, Guccio was in a safe place, and Tolomei knew where. What did the cloister matter to her now!

She was no longer listening to what her brother Jean was saying. She knew it all by heart. Even Pierre de Cressay sat silent, looking vaguely weary. Without daring to say so, he blamed himself for having also given way to anger. He was leaving it to his brother to convince himself that he had acted properly; he left it to Jean to speak of the honour of their blood and the laws of chivalry, so as to justify their immense folly.

When the Cressay brothers came from their poor little ramshackle manor, from their courtyard which stank of the dunghill all the year round, and saw Tolomei’s princely residence, the brocades, the silver bowls, when they felt beneath their fingers the delicate carving on the chairs and became aware of that atmosphere of wealth and abundance which permeated the whole house, they were forced to recognize that their sister would not have been so badly off if they left her to her own inclination. The younger one sincerely regretted it. ‘At least one of us would have been well provided for, and we should all have benefited,’ he thought. But the bearded one, with his stubborn nature, merely felt the more spite as well as a base jealousy. ‘Why should her sins give her a right to so much wealth through sinning, while we live so poorly?’

Nor was Marie insensible to the luxury around her; it dazzled her, and merely increased her regrets.

‘If only Guccio had been even a little noble,’ she thought, ‘or if we had not been noble at all! What does chivalry matter? Can it be a good thing, when it makes one suffer so much? And is not wealth a sort of nobility in itself? What is the difference between making serfs labour and making money work?’

‘You need have no concern, my friends,’ said Tolomei at last; ‘leave everything to me. It’s the duty of uncles to repair the faults committed by their wicked nephews. Thanks to my influential friends, I have succeeded in getting your sister accepted by the Royal Convent of the Daughters of Saint-Marcel. Does that satisfy you?’

The two Cressay brothers looked at each other and nodded their heads in approval. The Convent of the Clarisses in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel enjoyed the highest reputation among female religious establishments. It was almost entirely confined to the daughters of the nobility. And it was there that the royal family’s bastards were occasionally concealed behind the veil. Jean de Cressay’s ill-temper vanished at once, appeased by the vanity of caste. And, to show that the Cressays were not unworthy of what was being done for their sister in her sin, he added hastily: ‘Excellent, excellent; besides, I think the Abbess is some sort of a relation of ours; our mother has often quoted her to us as an example.’

‘Then everything is for the best,’ continued Tolomei. ‘I shall take your sister to Messire Hugues de Bouville, the ex-Grand Chamberlain …’

The two brothers bowed slightly in their chairs to show their respect.

‘… from whom I obtained this favour,’ Tolomei went on; ‘and tonight, I promise you, she shall be inside the convent. You can therefore go home reassured; I will keep you informed.’

The two brothers asked no better. They were getting rid of their sister, and thought that they had done enough by handing her over to the care of others. The silence of the cloister would close over the scandal which, at Cressay, need from now on be mentioned only in whispers, or not even be mentioned at all.

‘May God keep you and inspire you with repentance,’ said Jean to his sister by way of goodbye.

He put much more warmth into his farewell to Tolomei and thanked him for the trouble he was taking. He very nearly reproached Marie for the grief she was causing this excellent man.

‘God keep you, Marie,’ said Pierre with emotion.

He wanted to kiss his sister, but dared not do so under the severe eye of his elder brother. And Marie found herself alone with the fat banker with the dark complexion, the fleshy mouth and the closed eye, who, strange as it might seem, was her uncle.

The two horses left the courtyard and the roaring of the broken-winded nag could be heard growing fainter; it was the last sound of Cressay moving out of Marie’s ken.

‘And now, let us eat, my child. And while we dine, we don’t weep,’ said Tolomei.

He helped the girl take off the cloak which was suffocating her; Marie looked surprised and grateful, for it was the first mark of attention, or even of simple courtesy, she had been shown for many weeks.