A child sneezed and there was the sound of a slap.
Captain Alain de Pareilles turned towards the royal loggia as if awaiting an order, and all eyes, all heads were turned in the same direction. It was as if the whole crowd were holding its breath.
Philip the Fair was standing at the balustrade, the members of his Council motionless about him. The line of their faces was detached from the background by the light of the torches. They were like a bas-relief in rose-coloured marble sculptured across the flank of the tower.
Even the condemned raised their eyes to the loggia. The King’s gaze met that of the Grand Master. They seemed to be taking each other’s measure, their glances interlocked. Who could tell what thoughts were theirs, what emotions, what memories surged within these two enemies? Instinctively the crowd felt that something grand, something terrible and superhuman had become implicit in this mute confrontation between the all-powerful prince, surrounded by the servants of his will, and the Grand Master of Chivalry bound to the stake of infamy, between these two men whom birth and the accident of history had raised above all other men.
Would Philip the Fair, with a gesture of ultimate clemency, reprieve the condemned? Would Jacques de Molay at this final moment humiliate himself and plead for mercy?
The King made a sign with his hand and an emerald shone upon his finger. Alain de Pareilles repeated the gesture to the executioner, who placed the lighted brand of tow under the faggots and brushwood of the pyre. A huge sigh rose from thousands of breasts, a sigh of relief and horror, excitement and dismay, a sigh made up of anguish and of revulsion and of pleasure.
Several women screamed. Children hid their heads in their parents’ clothes. A man’s voice was heard shouting, ‘I told you not to come!’
Smoke was rising in dense spirals which a gust of wind blew towards the loggia.
Monseigneur of Valois began coughing with the maximum of ostentation. He took a step backwards between Nogaret and Marigny and said, ‘If this goes on, we shall all be suffocated before your Templars are burned. You might at least have seen that they used dry wood.’
No one replied to his remark. Nogaret, with taut muscles and fiery eye, was greedily savouring his triumph. This pyre was the crown to seven years of struggle and of exhausting journeys, the result of thousands of words intended to convince, thousands of pages written to prove. ‘Go on, flame and burn,’ he thought. ‘You’ve held me at bay long enough. But I was in the right, and you’re defeated.’
Enguerrand de Marigny, taking his attitude from the King’s, forced himself to remain impassive and to look upon the execution as one of the necessities of power. ‘It had to be, it had to be,’ he kept repeating to himself. But watching men die, he could not but help thinking of death. The two condemned men before him ceased to be mere political abstractions. That they should have been declared prejudicial to public order in no way prevented their being creatures of flesh and blood, capable of thought, desire and suffering, like any one else, indeed like himself. ‘In their place, would I have been capable of such courage?’ Marigny asked himself, making no effort to restrain his admiration. The words ‘in their place’ gave him a cold shiver down the spine. He recovered himself. ‘Where the deuce do these thoughts come from?’ he thought. ‘I am as prone to illness and accident as anyone else, but nothing more. There is never a moment when my person is not guarded. I am as untouchable as the King.’
But seven years earlier the Grand Master had been in no danger, no one had been more powerful.
Hugues de Bouville, the good Chamberlain with the white and black hair, was secretly praying.
The wind veered, and the smoke, growing denser and rising higher every second, enveloped the condemned, almost hiding them from the crowd.
The two old men could be heard coughing and choking at their stakes.
Louis of Navarre, rubbing his red eyes, laughed inanely.
His brother Charles, the youngest of Philip the Fair’s sons, turned his face away. It was obvious that he found the spectacle painful. He was twenty years old; he was slender and had a pink and white complexion. Those who had known his father at the same age said that the resemblance was startling but that Charles had less vitality, and less authority too, a weak copy of a great original. The appearance was there, but the temper was lacking.
‘I’ve just seen a light in your house, in the tower,’ he said to Louis in a low voice.
‘It must be the guards wanting to have a look too.’
‘They could have my place with pleasure,’ murmured Charles.
‘What? Doesn’t it amuse you to see Isabella’s godfather roast?’ said Louis of Navarre.
‘Yes, it’s a fact that Molay was the godfather of our sister,’ murmured Charles.
‘I think that’s funny,’ said Louis of Navarre.
‘Be quiet, Louis,’ said the King, annoyed by their whispering.
To get rid of the uneasiness that was growing upon him, young Prince Charles compelled himself to think of something pleasant. He began to think of his wife Blanche, of Blanche’s wonderful smile, of Blanche’s body, of her tender arms soon to be stretched out to him, making him forget this horrible spectacle. How well she knew how to love him and spread happiness about her! If only their two children had not died when a few months old … But they would have others and then life would contain no single shadow. Enchantment and plenitude. Blanche had told him that tonight she was going to keep her cousin Marguerite company. But she would be home by now. Had she covered herself up well? Had she taken a sufficient escort?
The roaring of the crowd made him start. Flames were now leaping from the pyre. On an order from Alain de Pareilles, the archers extinguished their torches in the grass, and the night was now lit by the great brazier alone.
The flames reached the Preceptor of Normandy first. He made a pathetic movement of withdrawal as the tongues of fire licked at him, and his mouth opened wide as if he were trying vainly to breathe. In spite of the rope that bound him, his body bent almost double; his paper mitre fell off and the great white scar across his purple face became visible. The fire was all about him. Suddenly a pall of grey smoke engulfed him. When it had dissipated, Geoffroy de Charnay was in flames, screaming and gasping and trying to tear himself from the fatal stake which was shaken to its base. The Grand Master could be seen shouting something to him, but the crowd was growling so loudly in an attempt to drown its own horror, that it was impossible to hear what he said, except for the word ‘Brother’ twice repeated.
The assistant executioners were falling over each other in their haste to bring up reserves of wood and poke the fire with long iron prongs.
Louis of Navarre, whose mind always worked slowly, asked his brother, ‘Did you say that there was a light in the Tower of Nesle?’
For one moment he seemed disquieted.
Enguerrand de Marigny had placed a hand before his eyes as if to protect them from the light of the flames.
‘A fine vision of hell you’ve given us here, Nogaret!’ said Monseigneur of Valois. ‘Were you thinking of your future life?’
Guillaume de Nogaret did not reply.
The pyre had become a furnace and Geoffroy de Charnay was now no more than a blackened, sizzling object, swollen and blistered, slowly collapsing into the cinders, becoming cinder itself.
Women were fainting. Others were going quickly to the river bank to vomit into the channel, almost beneath the King’s nose. The crowd, after so much shouting, had grown calmer, and was beginning to talk about miracles because the wind obstinately contined blowing in the same direction and the flames had not yet reached the Grand Master.
How could he last so long? On his side the pyre seemed intact. Then, suddenly, the pyre caved in and the flames, reviving, leapt all about him.
‘That’s done for him too!’