‘My Brother!’ said Jacques de Molay with a gesture of refusal.
‘For all the use they are likely to be to me now,’ replied Charnay. ‘Accept them, Brother; there is not even merit in the giving.’
As the iron pins were removed, they felt the hammer-blows resounding in their bones. But they felt the blood pounding in their chests more strongly still.
‘This time, we’ve come to the end,’ Molay murmured.
They wondered what kind of death had been reserved for them, whether they would be subjected to ultimate tortures.
‘It is perhaps a good sign that our irons are being removed,’ said the Visitor General, shaking his swollen hands. ‘Perhaps the Pope has decided upon clemency.’
There were still a few broken teeth in the front of his mouth and these made him lisp, while the dungeon had turned his mind childish.
The Grand Master shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the phalanx of a hundred archers.
‘We must prepare to die, Brother,’ he said.
‘Look, look what they have done to me,’ cried the Visitor, pulling up his sleeve to show his swollen arm.
‘We have all been tortured,’ said the Grand Master.
He looked away, as he always did when someone spoke of torture. He had yielded, he had signed false confessions and could not forgive himself.
He looked round upon the huge group of buildings which had been the seat and symbol of their power.
‘For the last time,’ he thought.
For the last time he gazed upon the vast assembly of tower and church, palace and houses, courts and gardens, a fortified town within Paris itself.6
Here it was that for two centuries the Templars had lived, prayed, slept, given judgment, transacted business, and decided upon their expeditions to distant lands. In this very tower the treasure of the Kingdom of France had been deposited, confided to their care and guardianship.
It was here, after the disastrous expeditions of Saint Louis, in which Palestine and Cyprus had been lost, that they had come, bringing with them in their train their esquires, their mules laden with gold, their stud of Arabian horses and their negro slaves.
Jacques de Molay saw in his mind’s eye this return of the vanquished. Even so, it had something of an epic quality.
‘We had become useless, and we did not know it,’ thought the Grand Master. ‘We were always talking of reconquest and new crusades. Perhaps we showed too much arrogance, and enjoyed too many privileges while no longer doing anything to justify them.’
From being the permanent militia of the Christian world, they had become the permanent bankers of Church and King. To have many debtors is to have many enemies.
Oh, the plot had been well conceived! The drama had begun upon the day when Philip the Fair had asked to join the Order that he might become its Grand Master. The Chapter had replied with a curt and definite refusal.
‘Was I wrong?’ Jacques de Molay asked himself for the hundredth time. ‘Was I too jealous of my authority? But no; I could not have acted otherwise; our rule is binding: no sovereign princes in our ranks.’
King Philip had never forgotten the repulse and the insult. He had begun by dissimulating, lavishing favours and kindnesses upon Jacques de Molay. Was not the Grand Master godfather to his daughter, Isabella? Was not the Grand Master the prop and stay of the kingdom?
Yet the royal treasure had been transferred from the Temple to the Louvre. At the same time a low, venomous campaign of obloquy had begun against the Templars. It was said that they speculated in corn and were responsible for famines, that they thought more of increasing their fortune than of capturing the Holy Sepulchre from the heathen. They were accused of blasphemy merely because they spoke the rough language of the camp. ‘To swear like a Templar’ became the current saying. From blasphemy to heresy was but a step. It was said that they practised unnatural vice and that their black slaves were sorcerers.
‘True it is that all our Brothers were not saints and that inaction was bad for many of them.’
Above all, it was said that during the ceremonies of initiation the neophytes were compelled to deny Christ and spit upon the Cross, that they were subjected to obscene practices.
Under the pretext of putting an end to these rumours, Philip had suggested to the Grand Master, for the sake of the honour and interest of the Order, that an inquiry should be opened.
‘And I accepted,’ thought Molay; ‘I was abominably duped and deceived.’
For, upon a certain day in October 1307 … oh, how well Molay remembered that day! ‘Upon its eve, he was still embracing me, and calling me brother, indeed giving me the place of honour at the funeral of his sister-in-law, the Countess of Valois.’
To be precise it was upon a Friday the thirteenth, an unlucky day if ever there was one, that King Philip, by means of a widespread police net, prepared long before, had arrested all the Templars of France at dawn upon a charge of heresy in the name of the Inquisition.
And Nogaret himself had come to seize Jacques de Molay and the hundred and forty knights of the Mother House.
Suddenly an order rang out. It startled the Grand Master and interrupted the flow of his thoughts, those thoughts in which he sifted yet once more the cause of the disaster. Messire Alain de Pareilles was drawing up his archers. He had put on his helmet. A soldier had his horse by the head and was holding his stirrup.
‘Let us go,’ said the Grand Master.
The prisoners were hustled towards the wagon. Molay climbed into it first. The Commander of Aquitaine, the man with the white film over his eye, who had defeated the Turks at Acre, still appeared utterly stupefied. He had to be hoisted up. The Brother Visitor was moving his lips in ceaseless, silent muttering. When Geoffroy de Charnay’s turn came to climb onto the wagon, an unseen dog began howling from somewhere in the neighbourhood of the stables, and the scar upon the Preceptor of Normandy’s forehead puckered deeply.
Drawn by four horses in tandem, the heavy wagon began to move forward.
As the huge gates opened, the crowd set up a great clamouring. Several thousand people, all the inhabitants of that district and the neighbouring ones, were crowding against the walls. The leading archers had to force a passage through the howling mob with blows of their pike-shafts.
‘Make way for the King’s men!’ cried the archers.
Erect upon his horse, his expression still impassively bored, Alain de Pareilles dominated the tumult.
But when the Templars appeared, the clamour was suddenly stilled. At the spectacle of these four emaciated old men, whom the jolting of the unsprung wheels jostled against each other, the people of Paris suffered a moment of dumb stupefaction, of spontaneous compassion.
But then cries arose of ‘Death! Death to the heretics!’ from royal agents mingling with the crowd. And then the people, always prepared to shout on the side of power and to make a noise when it costs them nothing, began to yell in concert, ‘Death to them!’
‘Thieves!’
‘Heretics!’
‘Look at them! They’re no longer so proud today, heathens that they are! Death to them!’
Insults, gibes, threats rose along the whole length of the grim procession. But the frenzy was sporadic. A whole section of the crowd remained silent, and its silence, though prudent, was none the less significant.
For things had changed in the seven years that had elapsed. The way the case had been conducted was known. People had seen Templars at the church doors showing the public the bones fallen from their