Eleanor of Aquitaine by Marion Meade Read Free Book Online Page B

appointees. These actions inevitably led to his excommunication.
     
    When Eleanor was thirteen, her father again clashed with the Church, and in that year of 1135 people said that God’s patience with her father had ended and that he had reached down to rescue the duke from damnation. At the time this momentous incident took place, William was away from home at his chateau in Parthenay, but God, through his emissary Bernard, found him just the same. News of a miracle travels on ghostly wings of air, and before her father returned to Poitiers, Eleanor must have already heard the incredible story being whispered among her high-born ladies and spoken of openly in kitchen and stable. Once more Bernard had come all the way from Champagne to seek out the intractable duke, but when he arrived at the château. William refused to see him. At last cooler heads prevailed, and then he had listened, full of truculence, as the holy man urged him to abandon the evil Anacletus and return to God. As it took a hard man to withstand the uncompromising eloquence of Bernard of Clairvaux, William gradually began to weaken and grudgingly promised that he would acknowledge Innocent. He would not, however, reinstate the expelled bishops; as a knight he could not, for he had sworn never to permit them in his domain again. Bernard sighed and stared at the duke in his deplorably fine and precious raiment, his huge muscular body radiating good health. Once, some fifteen years earlier, he had thundered, “Wine and white bread benefit the body, not the soul. The soul is not fattened out of frying pans.” If William was content to leave his soul malnourished, Bernard would find other means of fattening it.
    The next morning the square outside the château was packed with people from leagues around; the lamest peasant had risen from his pallet to crowd into the Church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre, where the worshipers all but mobbed the saint before he said Mass. Hardly anyone in the town was absent, including the excommunicated William, who, unable to step foot over the threshold, skulked outside on the porch, pacing fretfully to and fro as he watched Bernard at the altar. After the pax, still holding the Host upon the paten, Bernard turned around and caught sight of William in the doorway. With a sudden burst of inspiration, he slowly began to make his way down the aisle, the Host held triumphantly before him, his gaze never departing from the figure of the duke. If William could not come to God, then he would bring God to William. He called out to the duke, “We have petitioned you and you have spurned us. In the recent council, the servants of God at your footstool you have treated with contempt.” Trampling each other to inch close behind Bernard, the townspeople saw their prince staring at Bernard in amazement.
    Thrusting the Host toward William, Bernard challenged: “Lo, here has come forth to you the Virgin’s son, the head and lord of that Church that you persecute. Your judge is present, in whose name every knee in heaven, on earth, below the earth is bowed. Do you spurn him? Do you treat him with the contempt with which you treat his servants?”
    William, pale and silent, began to sway like a tree trunk, and then his whole body stiffened, and he fell face downward at the holy man’s feet. When the duke’s chevaliers ran to lift him up, he collapsed again. Afterward people could not remember all the things said by the holy man, but some swore that the duke had groaned like an epileptic and foamed at the mouth. They had been there and had seen it with their own eyes.
    Bernard prodded the body at his feet, commanding William to rise. “The bishop of Poitiers whom you drove from his church is here. Go and make peace with him. Pledge yourself to him in the kiss of peace and restore him to his see. Then make satisfaction to God; render to him glory for your contempt.”
    Slowly William struggled to his feet and staggered toward the hated