The Royal Succession by Maurice Druon Read Free Book Online

conjunctions of destiny than to the words they may exchange.
    When Philippe bowed to kiss his ring, the Cardinal murmured, `You would make an excellent regent, Monseigneur.'
    Philippe straightened up. `Does he realize that I have been thinking all this time of nothing else?' he wondered. And he replied: `Would you not yourself, Monseigneur, make an excellent Pope?'
    And they could not help smiling discreetly to each other, the old man with a sort of paternal affection, the young man with friendly deference.
    `I will be beholden to you; Philippe added, "if you will keep secret the grave news you have brought me until it is publicly announced.'
    `T will do so, Monseigneur, in order to serve you.'
    Left alone, the Count of Poitiers reflected only for a few seconds. Then he summoned his first chamberlain.
    `Adam Heron, has no courier arrived from Paris?' he asked. `No, Monseigneur.'
    `Then close all the gates of. Lyons.'
    4. Let us dry our tears
    THAT MORNING the people of Lyons were without vegetables.
    The market-gardeners' wagons had been stopped outside the walls, and the housewives were clamouring in the empty markets.
    The o nly bridge, that over the Saone (for the one over the Rhone had not yet been completed), was barred by soldiery. But if one could not enter Lyons, one could not leave it either. Italian merchants, travellers, itinerant friars, reinforced by loungers and idlers, gathered about the gates and demanded an explanation. The guard invariably replied: `The Count of Poitiers' orders,' with the distant and important air that agents of authority tend to adopt when executing an order they do not understand.
    People were shouting:
    `But my daughter is ill at Fouviere ...'
    `My barn at Saint-Just burned down yesterday at vespers...' '
    `The bailiff of Villefranche will have me arrested if I don't take him my poll-tax today ...'
    `The Count of Poitiers' orders!'
    And when the crowd began to press forward, the royal sergeants-at-arms raised their maces.
    There were strange rumours going round the town.
    Some declared that there was going to be war. But with whom? No one could say. Others asserted that a bloody riot had taken place during the night near the Augustinian monastery between the King's men and those of the Italian cardinals. Horses had been heard going by. Even the number of the dead was mentioned. But at the Augustinians' all was quiet.
    The Archbishop, Pierre de Savoie, was very anxious, wondering whether the events which had taken place before 1312 were about to begin all over again and whether he would be compelled to abandon, to the advantage of the archbishopric of Sens, the primacy of the Gaules, the only prerogative he had succeeded in preserving when Lyons had been attached to the Crown. 5 He had sent one of his canons for news; but the canon, having gone to the Count of Poitiers' lodging, had been met by a curtly silent equerry. And now the Archbishop was expecting an ultimatum.
    The cardinals, who were lodged in various religious houses, were no less anxious and, indeed, inclined to panic. Were they to be treated as they had been at Carpentras? But how could they escape this time? Messengers rushed from the Augustinians to the Franciscans and from the Jacobins to the Carthusians. Cardinal Caetani had sent his general assistant, the Abbe Pierre, to Napoleon Orsini, to Albertini de Prato and to Flisco, the only Spaniard, with orders to say to those prelates: `Look what has happened! You let yourselves be persuaded by the Count of Poitiers. He swore not to molest us, that we should not even have to go into seclusion to vote, and that we should be completely free. And now he has shut us up in Lyons!'
    Dueze himself received the visit of two of his Provencal colleagues, Cardinal de Mandagout and Berenger Fredol, the elder. But Dueze pretended to have but just emerged from his theological studies and to know nothing. During this time, in a cell near the Cardinal's apartment, Guccio Baglioni was sleeping