The King Without a Kingdom (21 page)

People’s greatest misfortunes, you see, Archambaud, happen to them for the smallest of reasons, for an error of judgement or a decision taken in circumstances that seemed wholly without importance to them, and where they follow their natural bent … The tiniest of choices, and a catastrophe occurs.

Ah! How then they would love to be allowed to start again, go back in time, to the fork in the path where they took the wrong turn. John of Harcourt jostles Robert of Lorris aside, shouting: ‘Farewell, messire’, mounts his huge horse, and everything is different. He sees his uncle once more, his castle, his wife and his nine children, and he prides himself, for the rest of his days, on having escaped the king’s dirty trick … Unless, unless, his day had come, so that as he fled he broke his head open in the forest, crashing into a hanging branch. God’s will is unfathomable! And still, we mustn’t forget … a fact that this bad justice eclipses … that Harcourt really was plotting against the crown. Well, King John’s day had not come, and God was reserving yet more misfortune for France, of which the king would serve as the instrument.

The cortège climbed the hill on which stood the gallows, but its journey ended halfway up at a large square clearing, bordered with low-slung houses, where every autumn the horse fair is held; they call it the Field of Forgiveness. Yes, that really is its name. The men-at-arms lined up in ranks on both sides of the road that crossed the square, leaving a distance three lances long between their lines.

The king, on horseback still, remained in the middle of the roadway, a stone’s throw from the block that the sergeants had rolled out of the first cart, and which needed to be set up on the flat.

The Marshal of Audrehem dismounted, and the royal retinue, dominated by the heads of the two brothers Artois … what could those two be thinking? It was the elder one who bore the responsibility for these executions. Oh! They were thinking nothing at all … ‘My cousin John, my cousin John’ … The retinue formed a semi-circle. Louis of Harcourt was watched carefully as his brother was made to get down; he didn’t flinch.

The preparations went on and on, for this makeshift justice in the middle of a fairground. And all around the square there were eyes glued to the windows.

The dauphin-duke stood about, his head tilting forward under his pearled hood, in the company of his young uncle of Orléans; walked a few paces, came back, went off again as if trying to dispel his uneasiness. And suddenly the fat Count of Harcourt turns to him, and addresses him, and Audrehem, shouting with all of his might:

‘Ah, sire duke, and you, kind marshal, in God’s name, let me speak to the king, and I will find the words to apologize, and I will tell him such things that will benefit both him and his kingdom.’

Not one who heard him doesn’t remember having his soul torn apart by the tone in his voice, a harrowing cry filled with final dread and malediction.

In a single movement, the duke and the marshal approach the king, who was able to hear the prisoner as well as they. They draw so close as to almost be touching his horse. ‘Sire my father, in God’s name, let him speak to you!’

‘Yes, sire, allow him to speak to you, and you will be better off for it,’ insisted the marshal.

But John II is only an imitator! In matters of chivalry he copies his grandfather, Charles of Valois, or King Arthur of the legends. For executions he relies on what he knows about the practices of Philip the Fair: he, once he had ordered one, remained inflexible. So he copies, believing that he is copying the Iron King. But Philip the Fair would never have put on a helmet unless it was necessary. And he didn’t condemn left, right and centre, founding his justice on the murky brooding of his hatred.

‘Have the traitors delivered,’ repeated John II through his open ventail.

Ah! How grand he must feel, he must feel omnipotent. The kingdom and the ages will remember his severity. He has just squandered a fine opportunity to reconsider.

‘So be it! Let us confess,’ says the Count of Harcourt, turning to the grubby Capuchin. And the king cried: ‘No, no confessions for traitors!’

And there, he is no longer copying, he is creating. He is treating the crime as … but what crime after all? The crime of being suspected, the crime of pronouncing wicked words that were repeated by others … let us say the crime of lèse-majesté, like that of the heretics or the relapsed. Because John II was anointed, was he not?
Tu es sacerdos in aeternum
… So he thinks he is God incarnate, and can decide where souls go after death. On that point as well, the Holy Father should have, in my opinion, severely reprimanded him.

‘Only that one, the equerry …’ he adds, pointing out Colin Doublel.

Who knows what goes on in a brain as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese? Why this discrimination? Why grant confession to the equerry who threatened him with his knife? Even today, when those who were present talk amongst themselves of that terrible hour, this oddness in the king’s behaviour is still a source of wonder. Did he wish to establish that degrees of sin should follow the feudal hierarchy, signifying that an equerry who committed a crime is less guilty than a knight? Or could it be that the knife brandished at his chest made him forget that Doublel was also one of the assassins of Charles of Spain … just like Mainemares and Graville, Mainemares thrashing about in his bonds, a tall, raw-boned fellow, his eyes furiously darting around him, Graville stock-still, unable to sign himself, but most conspicuously murmuring his prayers … If God wishes to hear his repentance, He will hear it well enough without an intercessor.

The Capuchin, who was beginning to wonder what he was doing there, hurriedly seizes the soul he is left with and whispers Latin into Colin Doublel’s ear.

The King of the Ribald pushes the Count of Harcourt before the block. ‘On your knees, messire.’

The huge man slumps to the ground like an ox. He shifts his knees, as the gravel is probably hurting him. The King of the Ribald, passing behind him, takes him by surprise and blindfolds him, denying him the sight of the knots in the wooden block, the last thing in the world he will have before him.

It is the others who should have been blindfolded, to spare them the spectacle that was about to take place.

The King of the Ribald … all the same it is curious that I should not be able to recall his name; I saw him several times around the king; and I can visualize his appearance very clearly, a tall and strong fellow who sports a thick, black beard … The King of the Ribald took the condemned man’s head with both hands to place it, like an object, as was required, and arrange his hair to reveal his neck.

The Count of Harcourt continued to move his knees about because of the gravel, making life difficult for the King of the Ribald … ‘Go on, cut off his head,’ he managed to say. And he saw, and everyone else saw, that the executioner was trembling. He couldn’t stop weighing up his great axe in his hands, sliding his fingers over the handle, trying to calculate the right distance from the block. He was afraid. Oh! He would have been more sure of himself with a dagger in the shadows. But an axe, for this sickly individual, and in front of the king and all of his lords, and all those soldiers! After several months in prison, his muscles can’t have felt that sturdy, even if he had been served a bowl of soup and a tumbler of wine to give him strength for the occasion. And he had not been given a hood, as is usually done, because there weren’t any to hand. Thus, everyone would know from that moment on that he had been an executioner. A criminal and an executioner. Quite enough to terrify most anyone. To know what was going on in his head, that one too, that Bétrouve, who was about to earn his freedom by performing the same act that had put him in prison in the first place. He saw the head that he was to chop off in the place where there should have been his own, in due course, had the king not passed through Rouen. Perhaps there was more charity in this scoundrel, more of a feeling of communion, more of a connection with his fellow men than there was in the king.

The King of the Ribald was forced to repeat: ‘Cut!’ Bétrouve raised his axe, not straight up above him like an executioner, but sideways, like a woodcutter about to fell a tree, and he let the axe drop under its own weight. The axe fell badly.

There are executioners who behead a man with one clean stroke. But not that one, oh no! The Count of Harcourt must have been stunned, since his knees no longer moved; but he wasn’t dead; the axe’s blow, feeble anyway, was resisted by the layer of fat lining his neck.

Bétrouve was forced to start again. Even worse. This time, the blade only cut open the side of his neck. Blood spurted out from a broad gaping wound, which revealed the thickness of the yellow fat.

The blade of the axe had got stuck in the wood of the block and Bétrouve struggled with it; he couldn’t get it out. Sweat was pouring down his face.

The King of the Ribald turned to the king with an apologetic air, as if to say: ‘It’s not my fault.’

Angry now, Bétrouve doesn’t hear what the sergeants are telling him as he frees the axe at last and strikes again; and it looked as if the axe blade cut into a slab of butter. And again and again! Blood gushes from the block, spouting under the blade, spraying the condemned man’s torn surcoat. Those watching turn away, sick to the stomach. The dauphin shows a face filled with horror and anger; he clenches his fists, turning his right hand purple. Louis of Harcourt, deathly pale, forces himself to stay in the front row, before the butchering of his brother. The marshal moves his feet to avoid the rivulet of blood meandering towards him over the ground.

Finally, on the sixth attempt, the huge head of the Count of Harcourt is severed from the trunk; encircled by its black blindfold, it hits the ground and rolls around at the base of the block.

The king doesn’t move. Through his steel window, and without giving the slightest sign of discomfort, disgust or uneasiness, he contemplates the bloody pulp between the enormous shoulders, right in front of him, and the solitary head, spattered in blood and filth, in the middle of a sticky puddle. If anything showed on his metal-framed face, it was a smile. An archer fainted in a clatter of iron. Only then did the king avert his gaze. That weakling would not remain long in his guard. Perrinet le Buffle let off steam by lifting up the archer by the collar of his gambeson and slapping him full force across the face. But the lily-livered weakling, through his swoon, had done everybody a favour. They all began to pull themselves together; there was even some nervous laughter.

Three men, no fewer would have managed it, dragged the headless body backwards. ‘Put it in a dry place,’ cried the King of the Ribald. We mustn’t forget that the clothes were his by right. It was enough that they should be torn; if they had been too bloodstained into the bargain, then he would get nothing for them. He already had two condemned men fewer than he had anticipated …

And for the following execution, he exhorted his sweating and panting executioner, lavishing his advice on him as if on an exhausted wrestler: ‘You raise it straight above your head, and you don’t look at your axe, you look where you should be striking, at the middle of the neck. And wham!’ And he put some straw at the foot of the block, to dry out the ground, and blindfolded the eyes of Sire of Graville, a good Norman, rather chubby, made him kneel, put his face into the sludge of meat on the block. ‘Cut!’ And there, in one go … a miracle … Bétrouve slices his neck clean through; and the head falls forward while the body crumples to the side, disgorging a red stream into the dust. And the people feel almost relieved. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to congratulate Bétrouve who gazes around him, dumbfounded, looking as though he wondered how on earth he had managed it.

Next it’s the turn of the tall, lopsided swaying Maubué of Mainemares who has a look of defiance for the king. ‘Everyone knows, everyone knows …’ he cries out. But as the bearded one is in front of him and is putting on his blindfold, his words are smothered and nobody catches what he wanted to say.

The Marshal of Audrehem moves again because the blood is heading for his boots … ‘Cut!’ One blow of the axe, once again, a single one, firmly dealt. And that is enough.

Mainemares’s body is pulled backwards and heaped with the other two. To make them easier to grab hold of, the cadavers’ hands are untied, so that using all four limbs the men swing them, and heave ho! throw them into the first cart that will take them up to the gibbet where they are to be hung up on the charnel house. They would be stripped of their belongings up there. The King of the Ribald indicates to his men to gather together the heads as well.

Bétrouve is trying to get his breath back, leaning on the axe handle. His back aches; he can’t take any more. And one would be inclined to pity him, if anyone. Ah! He will have earned his letters of remission! If he has nightmares till his dying day, crying out in his sleep, it would be no surprise.

Colin Doublel, the brave equerry, was tense, even though he had been absolved. He made a movement to break away from the hands that were pushing him towards the block; he wanted to go there alone. But the blindfold was intended precisely to avoid the disorderly movements of condemned men.

However Doublel couldn’t be stopped raising his head at the wrong moment, and there Bétrouve … there, he really wasn’t to blame … split open his skull from one side to the other. Come on! Once again. There, it was done.

Ah! They would have some tales to tell, the Rouennais watching from the neighbouring windows, things that would be repeated from one town to the next, right to the farthest reaches of the duchy. And people would come from all over just to gaze at this square of ground that had drunk so much blood. It was hard to believe that four bodies could contain so much, and that it would make such a huge mark on the ground.

King John looked at his people with a strange satisfaction. The horror he inspired at that instant, even in his most loyal servants, wasn’t, so it appeared, to his disliking; he was rather proud of himself. He looked particularly hard at his eldest son … ‘There you see, my boy, how one behaves when one is king …’