The Royal Succession (23 page)

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! Some
one 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?'

`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 h
ad 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 fate 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, ar
rived 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 w
ithout another word. `The King
.. the
Kin--.
..' he kept muttering to himself.

The Count of Poitiers was King; a little Lombard was to be
taken to Sain
t-Denis; and Jean I was alive.
Bouville returned to his wife.

`Philippe has been recognized,' he told her. `What's going to happen to us, with this king left on our hands?'

`He must be made to disappear.'

`Oh, no!' cried Bouville in indignation.

`No, I don't mean that. You're losing your wits, Hugues!' replied Madame de Bouville. `I mean he must be hidden.'

`But then he. will not reign.'

`He'll live at least, And perhaps one day. C
an one ever tell?'

But how was he too be hidden? Who could be trusted with him without rousing suspicion? To begin with, he had to continue to be fed.

`The wet-nurse, There is no one but the wet-nurse who can be any use to us,' said Madame de Bouville. `Let's go and see her.''

They had been well advised to await the departure of the last barons before telling Marie de Cressay that her son was dead. For the cry she uttered pierced the manor walls. To
those who
heard it, and were aghast at the sound, it was later explained that it was the Queen who had screamed. Yet the Queen, semiconscious as she was, sat up, in bed and asked: `What's the matter?'

Even the old, Seneschal de, Joinville started out of the depths of his torpor.

`Someone's been killed,' he said; 'I heard the cry of someone having: his throat cut.'

And Marie was saying over and over again: 'I want to see him! I want to see him!
I want to
see him!'

Bouville and his wife had to restrain her by force from rushing dementedly through the chateau. ,

For two whole hours they did their best to calm and console her, and above all to justify themselves; repeating again and again explanations to which she paid no heed.

Bouville might well assert that it was no fault of his, that it was the criminal act of the Countess Mahaut. The words took unconscious root in Marie's memory, from which they were to
be resur
rected later; but at the moment they had no meaning.

From time to time she ceased sobbing, gazed straight before her, and then began suddenly to howl again like a dog run over by a wagon.

The Bouvilles thought she was losing her reason. She exhausted all their arguments: thanks to her involuntary sacrifice, Marie had saved the true King of France, the desce
ndant of that illustrious line
...

`You are young,'
said Madame de Bouville, `you will have other child
ren. What woman has not lost at
least one child in the cradle in her life?'

And she quoted the stillborn twins of Blanche of Castille, and all the children of the royal family who had died in the last three
generations. How many mothers among the Angevins, the Courtenays, the Burgundians, the Chatillons and the Bouvilles themselves had not been regularly bereaved and yet ended up happily with a vast family! Among the twelve or fifteen children that one woman might bring into the world, it was unusual for more than half to survive.

`But I understand very well,' went on Madame de Bouville. `It's always harder to lose the first.'

`But you don't understand!' Marie cried through her tears, `I shall never be able to replace this one!'

The child who had been killed was the child of love, born of a love and a faith greater than all the laws and restraints of this world; he had been the dream for which she had paid the price of two months' outrage and four months' cloister, the wonderful gift with which she had wished, to present the man she had chosen, the miraculous plant in whom she had hoped to see flowering, every day of her life, her crossed yet marvellous love!

`No, you cannot understand!' she groaned. `You have not been turned away by your family because of a child. No, I shall never have another!'

When one explains one's unhappiness, translates it into rational terms, it is because one has already admitted it to oneself: The shock, the almost physical pressure, was slowly giving way to the second stage of sorrow: the cruelty of awareness.

`I knew it, I knew it! When I didn't want to come here, I knew that disaster lay in wait for me!'

Madame de Bouville dared make no reply.

`And what will Guccio say when he knows?' said Marie. `How shall I ever be able to break it to him?'

`He must never know, my child, never!' cried Madame de Bouville. `No one must know that the King lives, for those who missed their aim the first time would unhesitatingly try again. You are in danger yourself for you acted in concert with us. You must keep the secret until you are authorized to reveal it.'

And to her husband she whispered: `Go and get the Gospels.'

When Bouville had returned with the great book, which he had taken from the chapel, they persuaded Marie to place her hand on it and swear to maintain absolute silence towards even the father of her dead child, in the confessional even, concerning
the events that had taken place that day: Only Bouville or his wife could release her from her oath.

In her present condition Marie agreed to swear all that they asked. Bouville promised her a pension; but little she cared for money.

`And now you must keep the King of France, my child, and tell everyone that he is yours,' added Madame de Bouville.

Marie rebelled. She could no longer bring herself to touch the child in whose stead her own had been murdered. She wished to remain at Vincennes no longer, she wanted to escape, no matter where, and then to die.

`You'll die quickly enough, you may be sure of that, if you talk. Mahaut will see to it that you are poisoned or stabbed.'

`No, I, shall not talk, I promise you, But for God's sake let me go!'

`You shall go, you shall go. But you cannot let that child die too. Don't you see he's hungry? Feed him today at least,' said Madame- de Bouville, placing in her arms
.
Queen Clemence's child.

When Marie held the
baby to her, her
tears, fell faster than ever. She felt the empty place at the other breast too keenly.

`Keep him. He will be as if he were yours,' insisted Madame de Bouville. `And when the time comes to place him back on the throne, you will take an honoured place at Court with him; you will be his second mother.'

One lie more or less cost her nothing. But, in any case, it was not honours promised by the Curator's: wife which could touch Marie,
but the presence of the little
life in her hands to which, unconsciously, she was to transfer her maternal feeling.

She placed her lips against the baby's downy head and, with
a gesture that had become autom
atic, opened her
bodice, murmuring
: `No, I cannot let him die,, my little Jean, my little Jean
..'

The Bouvilles heaved a sigh of relief. 'They had won, for the moment at least.

`She- must not still be in Vincennes tomorrow, when they come to take her child away,' Madame' de Bouville said in a whisper to her husband.

The next day Marie, who was prostrate and had left all decision to Madame de Bouville, was taken back to the Convent o
f the Clarisses with the child.

To the Mother Abbess Madame de Bouville explained that Marie had been much shaken by the death of the little King, and that no attention should be paid to a
ny absurdities she might utter.