The Strangled Queen. Морис Дрюон

stand of wrought-iron. The bell of the Sainte-Chapelle rang the evening angelus.

      Suddenly a deep sigh, almost a groan, sounded from the darkest corner of the room; everyone started, and Louis X could not help crying out in a sharp voice, ‘What’s that?’

      Mathieu de Trye entered, followed by a valet bringing Louis a dry robe. The valet went down on all fours and pulled from under a piece of furniture a big greyhound with a high curved backbone and a fierce eye.

      ‘Come, Lombard, come here.’

      It was Philip the Fair’s favourite pet, present of the banker Tolomei, the same dog that had been found near the King when he had fallen motionless during his last hunt.

      ‘Four days ago this hound was at Fontainebleu, how has he managed to get here?’ asked The Hutin furiously.

      An equerry was called.

      ‘He came with the rest of the pack, Sire,’ explained the equerry, ‘and he will not obey; he runs away at the sound of a voice and I have been wondering since yesterday where he had hidden himself.’

      Louis ordered that Lombard should be taken away and shut up in the stables; and, as the big greyhound resisted, scraping the floor with its claws, he chased it out with kicks.

      He had hated dogs since the day when, as a child, he had been bitten by one as he was amusing himself piercing its ear with a nail.

      Voices were heard in a neighbouring room, a door opened and a little girl of three appeared, awkward in her mourning robe, pushed forward by her nurse who was saying, ‘Go on, Madame Jeanne; go and kiss Messire the King, your father.’

      Everyone turned towards the little figure with pale cheeks and too-big eyes, who had not yet reached the age of reasoning but was, for the moment, the heiress to the throne of France.

      Jeanne had the round, protruding forehead of Marguerite of Burgundy, but her complexion and her hair were fair. She came forward looking about her at people and things with the anxious expression of an unloved child.

      Louis X stopped her with a gesture.

      ‘Why has she been brought here?’ he cried. ‘I don’t want to see her. Take her back at once to the Hôtel de Nesle; that’s where she must live, because it’s there …’

      He was going to say, ‘… that her mother conceived her in her illicit pleasures.’ He stopped himself in time, and waited till the nurse had taken the child away.

      ‘I don’t want ever to see the bastard again!’ he said.

      ‘Are you really certain that she is one, Louis?’ asked Monseigneur of Evreux, moving his clothes away from the fire to prevent their scorching.

      ‘It’s enough for me that there is a doubt,’ replied The Hutin, ‘and I refuse to recognize the progeny of a woman who has shamed me.’

      ‘All the same, the child is fair-haired, as we all are.’

      ‘Philippe d’Aunay was fair too,’ replied The Hutin bitterly.

      ‘Louis must have good reasons, Brother, to speak as he does,’ said Charles of Valois.

      ‘What’s more,’ Louis went on, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I don’t ever again want to hear the word that was thrown at me as we passed through the hall; I don’t want to go on imagining all the time that people are thinking it; I don’t want ever again to give people the chance of thinking it.’

      Monseigneur of Evreux was silent. He was thinking of the little girl who must live among a few servants in the deserted immensity of the Hôtel de Nesle. He heard Louis say, ‘Oh, how lonely I shall be here!’

      Louis of Evreux looked at him, surprised as always by this nephew of his who gave way to every impulse of his mood, who preserved resentments as a miser keeps his gold, chased dogs away because he had once been bitten, his daughter because he had once been deceived, and then complained of his solitude.

      ‘If he had had a better nature and a kinder heart,’ he thought, ‘perhaps his wife would have loved him.’

      ‘Every living man is alone, Louis,’ he said gravely. ‘Each one of us in his loneliness undergoes the moment of recognition of sin, and it is mere vanity to believe that there are not moments like this in life. Even the body of the wife with whom we sleep remains a stranger to us; even the children we have conceived are strangers. Doubtless the Creator has willed it thus so that we may each of us have no communion but with Him and with each other but through Him. There is no help but in compassion and in the knowledge that others suffer as we do.’

      The Hutin shrugged his shoulders. Had Uncle Evreux never anything to offer as consolation but God, and as a remedy but charity?

      ‘Yes, yes, you are doubtless right, Uncle,’ he said. ‘But that is no answer to the cares that oppress me.’

      Then, turning to Artois who, his backside to the fire, was steaming like a soup-tureen, he said, ‘So you’re certain, Robert, that she will not yield?’

      Artois shook his head.

      ‘Sire, Cousin, as I told you last night, I pressed Madame Marguerite in every way in my power: I gave her the most convincing arguments,’ replied Artois, with an irony which was valid only for himself. ‘I ran up against such a hard core of refusal that I can assure you with certainty there is nothing to be got from her. Do you know what she’s counting on?’ he added perfidiously. ‘She is hoping that you will die before her.’

      Instinctively Louis X touched through his shirt the little reliquary he wore about his neck, and for a moment turned away, wild of eye, his hair in disorder. Then, speaking to the Count of Valois, he said, ‘Well, Uncle, you see it’s not all as simple as you promised, and it seems that my annulment is not to be had tomorrow!’

      ‘I know, Nephew, I am thinking of nothing else,’ replied Valois, his brow wrinkled in thought.

      Artois, standing face to face with The Hutin, whose forehead came up only to his shoulder, said to him in a whisper that could have been heard twenty yards away, ‘If you are afraid of a celibate life, Cousin, I can always furnish your bed with charming young females, whom the promise of a purse of gold and the vanity of pleasuring the King would render most agreeable to you.’

      He spoke with a certain relish, as if of a fine roast or a dish with an exquisite sauce.

      Monseigneur of Valois spread out his ring-laden hands.

      ‘Of what use is an annulment to you, Louis,’ he said, ‘so long as you have not chosen the new woman you wish to marry? Don’t be so anxious about your annulment; a Sovereign can always obtain one in the end. What you need to do at once is to set about finding the wife who will make a suitable figure as queen beside you and give you a fine posterity.’