It was Mahaut of Artois.
The congregation showed some surprise perhaps, but no very great astonishment. Robert was following the precedent of the Count of Flanders at the coronation. It seemed to have become customary for a peer who thought himself wronged to bring his complaint forward on these solemn occasions; and it was obviously done with the King’s prior consent.
Duke Eudes of Burgundy looked inquiringly at his sister, the Queen of France, who gazed back at him and with a movement of her open hands gave him to understand that she was as much surprised as he was and knew nothing of the matter at all.
‘Cousin,’ said Philippe, ‘can you produce documents in evidence to prove your rights?’
‘I can,’ Robert said firmly.
‘He can’t, he’s lying!’ cried Mahaut, who now left the stalls and came to stand beside her nephew in front of the King.
How alike Robert and Mahaut were. They were wearing identical coronets and robes; they were both equally angry, and the blood was mounting in their bull-necks. Mahaut, too, was wearing the great, gold-hilted sword of a peer of France on her Amazonian flank. They could have looked no more alike had they been mother and son.
‘Aunt,’ said Robert, ‘do you deny that the marriage contract made by my noble father, Count Philippe of Artois, appointed me, his first-born, heir to Artois, and that you took advantage of my being a child to dispossess me after my father’s death?’
‘I deny every word of it, you wicked nephew! How dare you try to disgrace me?’
‘Do you deny there was a marriage contract?’
‘I deny it!’ shouted Mahaut.
There was an angry murmur throughout the cathedral, and old Count de Bouville, who had been Chamberlain to Philip the Fair, was distinctly heard to utter a scandalized ‘Oh!’ Though it was not everyone who had as good reason as Bouville, who had been Curator of Queen Clémence’s stomach at the time of the birth of Jean I, the Posthumous, to know Mahaut of Artois’ remarkable capabilities in the realms of perjury and crime, it was quite obvious that she was flagrantly denying the evidence. A marriage between a son of the House of Artois, a prince of the fleur de lis,10 and a daughter of the House of Brittany would most certainly not have been arranged without a contract ratified both by the King and the peers of the time. Duke Jean of Brittany, though he had been a child at the time of the marriage, remembered it perfectly and was telling his neighbours so. This time Mahaut had gone too far. It was one thing to plead, as she had done in two lawsuits, the ancient custom of Artois, which was in her favour owing to the premature death of her brother, but it was quite another to deny that there had been a marriage contract. She merely succeeded in confirming everyone’s suspicions; and, in particular, that she had done away with the documents herself.
Philippe VI turned to the Bishop of Amiens.
‘Monseigneur, please bring the Holy Gospels and hand them to the plaintiff.’
He paused for a moment, then added: ‘And also to the defendant.’
And when it was done, he said: ‘My cousins, do you agree to maintain your statements by swearing on the Holy Gospels in the presence of ourself, your suzerain, and in the presence of the Kings, our cousins, and all your peers here assembled?’
Philippe looked really majestic as he said this, and his young son, Prince Jean, who was ten years old, gazed at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed, lost in admiration of his father. But the Queen of France, Jeanne the Lame, had a wicked, indeed a cruel line each side of her mouth, and her hands were trembling; while Mahaut’s daughter, the Dowager Queen Jeanne, the widow of Philippe the Long, a thin, dried-up woman, had gone as pale as her white dowager’s robe. And no less pale were Mahaut’s granddaughter, the young Duchess of Burgundy, and her fifty-year-old husband, Duke Eudes. They looked as if they would have liked to rush forward and stop Mahaut taking the oath. There was a great silence and everyone was watching.
‘I agree!’ said Mahaut and Robert together.
‘Take off your gloves,’ said the Bishop of Amiens.
Mahaut’s gloves were green, and the heat had made their dye run too. And when the two huge hands were stretched out towards the Holy Book, one was as red as blood and the other green as gall.
‘I swear,’ said Robert, ‘that the County of Artois is mine and that I shall produce documents in evidence to establish my right to it.’
‘My fine nephew,’ cried Mahaut, ‘do you dare swear that you have ever seen or possessed such documents?’
Face to face, grey eyes staring into grey eyes, their big square chins almost touching, they defied each other.
‘Bitch,’ thought Robert, ‘so it really was you who stole them!’ And since in such circumstances decision is vital, he said in a clear voice: ‘I swear it. But do you, my fine aunt, dare swear that these documents have never existed, and that you have never had knowledge or possession of them?’
‘I swear it,’ she replied with an assurance equal to his own, and she gazed at him, returning hate for hate. Neither of them had gained any advantage over the other. The balance was in equilibrium, the false oaths they had compelled each other to take weighing equally in the opposite scales.
‘Commissioners will be appointed tomorrow to make inquiry and enlighten my justice. Whoever has lied will be punished by God, whoever has sworn the truth shall be established in his right,’ said Philippe, signing to the Bishop to take the Gospels away.
God does not need to intervene directly to punish perjury, and the heavens may remain dumb. The wicked bear within themselves the seeds of their own misfortunes.
A GREEN PEAR, STILL NO larger than a man’s thumb, was hanging from the espalier.
There were three people sitting on a stone bench: old Count de Bouville, whom the others were questioning, was in the middle, on his right was the Chevalier de Villebresme, the King’s commissioner, and on his left the notary Pierre Tesson, who was recording his deposition.
Notary Tesson was wearing a clerk’s cap on his huge domed head, and his straight hair hung down from beneath it; he had a pointed nose, a curiously long and narrow chin, and his whole profile looked rather like the moon in its first quarter.
‘Monseigneur,’ he said with great respect, ‘may I read your evidence over to you?’
‘Do so, Messire, do so,’ replied Bouville.
And his hand moved fumblingly to the little, hard green pear. ‘The gardener ought to have that branch fastened back,’ he thought.
The notary leaned over the writing-board on his knee and began reading. ‘“On the seventeenth day of the month of June in the year 1329, We, Pierre de Villebresme, Chevalier …”’
King Philippe VI had allowed no delay. Two days after the oaths had been taken in Amiens