WAS THE BANKING HOUSE at Neauphle really so small, the church beyond the little market-square so low, and the road winding up towards Cressay, Thoiry and Septeuil so narrow? Or was it Guccio who had grown bigger, not in inches of course, for the body grows no taller after the age of twenty, but bigger in mind and in importance, as if his eyes had become used to vaster spaces and his sense of the place he held in the world had expanded?
Nine years had gone by! The façade, the trees, the steeple, all suddenly made him feel nine years younger. Or, on the other hand perhaps, older by all the time that had elapsed.
Guccio had instinctively bent his head, as he had in the past, when he went through the low door that separated the two rooms of business on the ground floor of this branch of the Tolomei bank. His hand had instinctively sought the handrope on the oak pillar round which the corkscrew staircase was built as he went up to his old room. And so it was here that he had loved, as never before and never since!
The tiny room under the eaves was redolent of the countryside and of the past. How could so small a room have contained so great a love? Beyond the window, which was barely more than a loophole, the landscape was unchanged. It was the beginning of May and the trees were in blossom as they had been when he had left nine years ago. Why did trees in blossom arouse so intense an emotion, and why should the snow that dropped from cherry-trees or lay, tinged with pink, under apple-trees seem to fall from the heart? Between the branches that curved upwards like arms he could see the roof of the stable from which he had fled on the arrival of the brothers Cressay. How frightened he had been that night!
He turned to the tin mirror, which still stood in the same place on the chest. At the memory of his weaknesses, every man tends to reassure himself by staring at his own face, forgetting that the signs of strength he detects in it impress only himself, and that it was before others he showed weakness. The grey reflection on the polished metal showed Guccio the likeness of a dark-complexioned young man of thirty, with a deep line between the eyebrows, and two dark eyes with which he was not wholly displeased, for they had already seen many and varied landscapes, mountain snows and ocean waves, and they had aroused desire in women’s hearts, and met the gaze of kings and princes.
‘Guccio Baglioni, my friend, why did you not go on with the career you began so well? You travelled from Siena to Paris, from Paris to London, from London to Naples and then to Lyons and to Avignon; you carried messages for Queen Isabella, treasure for cardinals, and a demand for the hand in marriage of Queen Clémence. During two fabulous years you lived and journeyed among the great of this world, charged with their interests and their secrets. And you were barely twenty! And all you did succeeded. The proof of it lies in the welcome you receive everywhere after nine years’ absence, and in the memories you left behind you and the friendship you inspired. And, in the first place, with the Holy Father himself. As soon as he saw you on a matter of business, the Sovereign Pontiff, from the elevation of the throne of Saint Peter, and though beset by so many tasks, showed an interest in your fate and fortune; he remembered even that you had had a son in the past, was concerned to learn that you had been deprived of your child, and devoted several of his precious minutes to giving you advice. “A son should be brought up by his father,” he said; and he furnished you with a papal messenger’s safe-conduct, the surest there is. And then Bouville! Bouville, whom you went to see, bearing Pope John’s blessing, and who treated you as a long-awaited friend, wept on seeing you, and gave you one of his own sergeants-at-arms to accompany you on your journey, as well as a letter, sealed with his own seal, addressed to the brothers Cressay, so that you should be allowed to see your son.’
And thus it was that the highest personages took notice of Guccio, and, so he thought, without any interested motive, but simply because he could inspire them with feelings of friendliness, owing, no doubt, both to his intelligence and his particular way of conducting himself in the presence of the great of this world, which was simply a natural gift he happened to possess.
Oh, why had he not persevered? He could so easily have become one of the great Lombards, as powerful among the nations as princes, such as Macci dei Macci, the real keeper of the Royal Treasury of France, or perhaps like Frescobaldi in England, who had access to the Chancellor of the Exchequer without having to be announced.
After all, was it too late? In his heart of hearts, Guccio felt he was his uncle’s superior and capable of an even more remarkable success. For good Uncle Spinello, if you looked at it objectively, was engaged very largely in purely short-term business. He had become Captain-General of the Lombards of Paris mostly because of his seniority and the fact that his colleagues knew they could trust him. He had common sense, of course, and indeed a certain cunning, but no very great ambition, nor any great talent to justify it. Guccio could look at these things quite impartially, now that he had grown out of the age of illusions and felt himself to be a man of sound judgment. Yes, he had been wrong over the deplorable affair of the child born to Marie de Cressay. That had been the cause of it all. And then his fear – and this he had to admit – of being beaten to death by Marie’s brothers!
For long months afterwards, his thoughts had been full of nothing but this unhappy event. He had been a prey to disappointed love, to despondency, to shame at seeing his friends and patrons after so inglorious an episode, and to dreams of revenge. He had been obsessed by these thoughts while beginning a new life in Siena, where no one knew anything of his unhappy adventure in France, except what he might care to tell them. Oh, she did not know, that ungrateful Marie, she did not know the great destiny she had destroyed by refusing to elope with him. How often he had thought bitterly of it in Italy. But now he was going to avenge himself.
And suppose Marie suddenly declared she still loved him, had been waiting loyally for him and that an appalling misunderstanding had been the only cause of their separation? Yes, suppose that was the case? Guccio knew he would yield at once, would forget his wrongs as soon as he had given them expression and would take Marie de Cressay back to Siena, to the family palace on the Piazza Tolomei, to show his beautiful wife off to his fellow-citizens. And he would show Marie the new city, which was smaller than Paris or London of course, but could rival them in beauty, with its Municipio only recently completed, of which the great Simone Martini was at this very moment finishing the interior, and with its black and white cathedral which would be the most beautiful in Tuscany, once its façade was done. Oh, the joys of sharing what one loved with a beloved wife! But what was he doing dreaming in front of a tin mirror, when he ought to be hurrying to Cressay and turning her surprise to his advantage?
But then he began to think. The bitterness he had nursed for nine years could not be forgotten all at once, nor indeed the fear that had driven him from this very garden. In the first place, it was his son he wanted above all. Perhaps he had better send the sergeant-at-arms down with the Count de Bouville’s letter; the demand would carry more weight. And then, after nine years, was Marie still as beautiful? Would he still be as proud of appearing with her on his arm?
Guccio believed he had now attained to maturity, reached the age at which one acted from reason. Yet, even if there was now a line between his eyebrows, he was still the same man, the same mixture of cunning and ingenuousness, pride and romantic dreams. For in truth the years have little effect on our nature and age does not free us of our faults. We lose our hair more quickly than our weaknesses.
She had dreamed of its happening for nine years, hoped for it, feared it, prayed God each day to bring it about and prayed the Virgin to spare it her; evening after evening, morning after morning, she had prepared what she would say if it occurred, she had murmured to herself every answer she could think of to all the questions she could imagine; she had thought of a hundred, a thousand ways in which it might come about. It had come about. And now she did not know how to meet the situation.
For that morning Marie de Cressay’s maid, who in the old days had been the confidante of her happiness and her tragedy, came to her room and whispered to her that Guccio Baglioni was back. He had been seen to arrive in the village of Neauphle; he had the retinue of a lord and several of the King’s sergeants as his escort; he seemed to be a messenger from the Pope. This was the popular gossip which, as it so often does, bore some relation to the truth, because a single detail had awakened local curiosity: the urchins in the market-square had stared open-mouthed at the yellow leather harness embroidered with the keys of Saint Peter, which was indeed a present from the Pope to his banker’s nephew, and that harness had set the whole village speculating.
And now the maid stood there breathless, her eyes bright with emotion and her cheeks red. Marie de Cressay had no idea what she ought or indeed would do.
She said: ‘Give me my dress.’
She said it at once and without thinking, but the maid understood. For Marie had very few dresses, and the dress she was asking for could only be the one that had been made long ago out of the beautiful piece of silk Guccio had brought her as a present. Every week it was taken out of the chest, carefully brushed, ironed, aired, sometimes wept over, and never worn.
Guccio might appear at any moment. Had the maid seen him? No. She was merely repeating the gossip which was going from house to house. Perhaps he was already on the way! If Marie had only had a whole day in which to prepare for his arrival. She had had nine years, but they were all reduced now to a single instant.
What did it matter that the water was cold with which she washed her breast, stomach and arms, while the servant turned away, surprised at her mistress’s sudden immodesty, though she could not resist a glance at the beautiful body which had been deprived so pitifully of a man for so long. She could not help being a little jealous at seeing how full and firm it had remained, like a fine plant in the sun, though the breasts were heavier than in the old days and sagged a little on to the chest, the thighs were not quite so smooth, and maternity had marked the stomach with a few small lines. So the bodies of noble girls spoiled too. Less than those of servants, of course. But they spoiled nevertheless, and it was God’s justice in making all His creatures the same.
Marie had difficulty getting into her dress. Had the material shrunk from being unused so long, or had Marie grown stouter? It was more perhaps that the shape of her body had altered, as if the curves and contours were no longer in the same places. She had changed. She knew that the fair down was thicker on her lip, and that the freckles, due to her open-air life in the fields, had spread over her face. Her hair, that mass of golden hair whose braids must be so hurriedly plaited, was neither as soft nor as gleaming as it once had been.
But now Marie had donned her party dress, which was a bit tight at the armholes; and her hands, reddened by housework, emerged from the green silk sleeves, empty hands, empty of all the nine years that had suddenly been abolished.
What had she done with all those years that now seemed but a sigh of time?
She had lived on her memories. She had drawn daily nourishment from those few months of love and happiness, as if from a harvest that had been too quickly garnered. She had crushed each moment of that past in the mill of her memory. A thousand times over she had seen the young Lombard come to claim his debt and drive away the wicked Provost, caught his first glance, and relived their first walk together. A thousand times over she had repeated her vow in the dark, silent chapel before the unknown monk. A thousand times over she had discovered her pregnancy. A thousand times over she had been dragged violently from the convent in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and taken in a closed litter, clasping her new-born child to her breast, to the royal Castle of Vincennes. A thousand times over she had seen her child dressed in the royal swaddling clothes, and then brought back to her dead. And it was still a dagger in her heart. And she still hated the Countess de Bouville even though she was dead, and she hoped she was suffering all the torments of Hell. A thousand times over she had been made to swear on the Bible to keep the little King of France, not to reveal the terrible secrets of the Court even in the confessional, and never to see Guccio again. And a thousand times over she had asked herself: ‘Why should this have happened to me?’
She had asked it of the great dumb blue sky of August days, of the winter nights she spent shivering alone between coarse sheets, of the hopeless dawns, and of the evenings of eventless days. Why?
She had asked it of the linen she counted for the laundry, of the sauces she stirred on the kitchen fire, of the meat she put in the salting-tub, and of the stream that ran below the manor, on whose banks the people picked jonquils and irises on the mornings of religious processions.
At moments she had hated Guccio, hated him for existing and for having passed through her life like a tempestuous wind through a house with open doors; and then she had immediately reproached herself for the thought as if it were a blasphemy.
In turn she had looked on herself as a great sinner on whom the Almighty had imposed this perpetual expiation, as a martyr, as a sort of saint expressly designated by the Divine Will to save the Crown of France, Saint Louis’s succession and the whole realm in the person of this little child who had been confided to her care. And it was like this that you could go mad, little by little, without those about you being aware of it.
She had only occasionally heard news of the one man she had ever loved, of her husband whom no one would recognize as such, and then only from a few words dropped by the employee at the bank to her maid. Guccio was alive. That was all she knew. How she suffered from imagining him, or rather being unable to imagine him, in a distant country, in a strange town, and to think that perhaps he had married again. The Lombards had no such great respect for a vow as all that. And now Guccio was only a quarter of a league away. But had he really come back for her sake? Or merely to deal with some matter at the bank? That would be the most terrible thing of all: that he should be so near and not for her sake. But could she blame him even for this, since it was she herself who had refused to see him nine years ago, so harshly told him he must never see her again, and without being able to reveal the reason for her cruelty. And suddenly she cried, ‘The child!’
For Guccio would want to see the little boy he believed his. It must surely be for that he had come?
Jeannot was out in the meadow – she could see it from the window – down by the Mauldre, the stream which was bordered with yellow irises and too shallow for there to be any danger of his drowning, playing with the groom’s youngest son, the wheelwright’s two boys and the miller’s daughter, who was round as a ball. He had mud on his knees and face, and even in the lock of fair hair that lay in a curl across his forehead. He had strong, rosy legs and was shouting at the top of his voice. People thought him a little bastard, a child of sin, and treated him as such.
But why did not Marie’s brothers, the peasants on the estate and the people of Neauphle see that Jeannot had nothing of that golden, almost auburn fairness that was his mother’s and less still of Guccio’s dark, almost gingerbread complexion? How could they fail to notice that he was a real little Capet, with his broad face, pale blue eyes set a little too far apart, his chin that would grow strong, and his straw-like fairness? King Philip the Fair was his grandfather. It was extraordinary how people shut their eyes so firmly to everything but the preconceived ideas they had of people and of things.
When Marie had suggested to her brothers that Jeannot should be sent to the monks of a neighbouring Augustinian monastery to be taught to write, they had merely shrugged their shoulders.
‘We can read a little and it’s not much good to us. We can’t write and it wouldn’t be any use to us if we could,’ the eldest replied. ‘Why do you want Jeannot to know more than we do? It’s all very well for priests to study, but you can’t even make him a priest since he’s a bastard.’
Down among the irises in the meadow the child was sulkily following the servant who had been sent to fetch him. With a pole in his hand, he had been playing at being a knight, and had almost broken through the defences of a shed where wicked men were holding the miller’s daughter prisoner.
And at this moment Marie’s brothers, Jeannot’s uncles, though they did not know they were only false uncles, came in from inspecting their fields. They were dusty, smelt of horses’ sweat and their nails were black. Pierre, the elder, was already like what his father had been; his stomach bulged over his belt, his beard was shaggy, his teeth rotten and the two eye-teeth missing. He was hoping for a war in which he could make his name; and whenever he heard talk of England or the Empire, he would declare that the King had only to raise an army and everyone would see what the chivalry could do. He had not, however, been dubbed knight; but he might perhaps become one in the course of a campaign. His only experience of war had been in Louis Hutin’s Muddy Host, for he had not been summoned to the expedition into Aquitaine. He had had a moment of hope on learning of Monseigneur Charles of Valois’s proposed crusade; but then Monseigneur Charles had died. Oh, that was the baron God should have given them for king!
Jean de Cressay, the younger, was both thinner and paler, but paid no greater attention to his appearance. His life was a mixture of indifference and routine. Neither of them had married. Their sister had kept house for them since the death of their mother, Dame Eliabel; and they had thus someone to look after the kitchen and the linen, and someone, too, with whom they could lose their temper from time to time, and more easily indeed than they would have dared to do with a wife. Should their breeches have a tear in them, they could always blame Marie for the fact that they had been unable to find suitable wives because of the shame she had brought on the family.
Nevertheless, they lived in modest ease thanks to the pension that Count de Bouville regularly sent their sister on the pretext that she had been a royal wet-nurse, and thanks also to the presents in kind the banker Tolomei continued sending the child he believed to be his great-nephew. Marie’s sin had therefore been of considerable advantage to the two brothers.
Jean knew a widow in Montfort-l’Amaury and visited her from time to time; and on those days he dressed himself up with a rather guilty air. Pierre preferred to hunt his own land, and felt himself quite a seigneur, and at little cost, because a number of children in the neighbouring villages had already begun to resemble him. But what did honour to a son of the nobility was dishonourable in a daughter of the nobility; this was an accepted fact, which was not open to discussion.
Pierre and Jean were much surprised to find their sister wearing her silk dress and Jeannot stamping with rage because he was being washed. Was it by any chance a feast day they had forgotten?
‘Guccio is in Neauphle,’ Marie said.
And she took a hasty step backwards, because Pierre was quite capable of slapping her face.
But Pierre did nothing. He merely stared at Marie. And Jean did the same. They both stood there, their arms dangling, like men whose minds were incapable of grasping the unexpected. Guccio had come back. It was an important piece of news and it took them several minutes to absorb it. What new problems was it likely to create? They had to admit they had liked Guccio very well, when he had been their hunting companion and had brought them hawks from Milan; but this was before they had realized the fellow was making love to their sister practically under their noses. Then, when Dame Eliabel had discovered that her daughter was sinfully pregnant, they had wanted to kill him. But they had regretted their violence when they had visited the banker Tolomei in his house in Paris, and had realized, too late, that if their sister married a rich Lombard it would be less of a dishonour than to keep her at home as the mother of a fatherless child.
However, they had little time to consider the news, for the sergeant-at-arms, in the livery of the Count de Bouville, trotting along on a great bay horse, and wearing a coat of blue cloth scalloped about the thighs, rode in to the manor’s courtyard, which was at once crowded with astonished onlookers. The peasants doffed their caps; children’s heads appeared in the doorways; the women wiped their hands on their aprons.
The sergeant had come to deliver two messages to the Sire Pierre, one from Guccio and the other from the Count de Bouville himself. Pierre de Cressay assumed the important and haughty expression of a man receiving a letter. He frowned, pursed his lips behind his beard and loudly ordered that the messenger should be given to eat and drink, just as if he had ridden fifteen leagues. Then he went aside with his brother to read the letters. And, indeed, the two of them were not too many. They had even to summon Marie, who was more skilled in interpreting the letters of the alphabet.
And Marie began to tremble, tremble, tremble.
‘We cannot understand it, Messire. Our sister began trembling as if Satan himself had appeared before her. And she utterly refused to see you. Then she burst into tears.’
The two Cressay brothers were much embarrassed. They had had their boots cleaned, and Jean had donned the tunic he normally wore only when visiting his widow in Montfort. They were standing looking abashed and rather uncertain of themselves in the back room of the branch bank of Neauphle, while Guccio contemplated them rather sourly and did not even ask them to sit down.
Two hours before, when they had received the letters, they had imagined they could do good business over their sister’s departure and the recognition of her marriage. A thousand livres cash down was what they intended asking. A Lombard could well afford that much. But Marie had destroyed their hopes by her strange attitude and her determination not to see Guccio.
‘We tried to reason with her, and indeed much to our own disadvantage; for, if she left us, we should miss her very much, since she does all the housekeeping. But, when it comes to it, we really do understand that, if you have come back to ask for her after so long a time, it must be because she really is your wife, even though the marriage took place in secret. Besides, much time has passed.’
The bearded brother was spokesman and he was getting a bit mixed up. His younger brother contented himself with nodding approval.
‘We frankly admit,’ went on Pierre de Cressay, ‘that we made a mistake when we refused you our sister. But it was not us so much as our mother – may God keep her! – who had decided against it. A gentleman should recognize his errors, and if our sister Marie acted without our consent, we were partly to blame. All that should be wiped out. Time is the master of us all. But now it is she who refuses to see you; and yet I swear to God that she has no other man in mind. That I do know. But I really don’t understand what it’s all about any more. Our sister’s got an odd mentality, hasn’t she, Jean?’
Jean de Cressay nodded.
For Guccio it was a splendid revenge to have these two men standing there stammeringly repentant, when they had once come sword in hand in the middle of the night to kill him, and had obliged him to leave France. Now they wanted to give him their sister more than anything else in the world. A little more and they would be praying him to take the bull by the horns, come to Cressay, impose his will and stand out for his rights as a husband.
But they misunderstood Guccio and his easily offended pride. He cared nothing for the two idiots. Only Marie mattered to him; and Marie was repulsing him when he was there so close to her, and had come prepared to forget all the injuries of the past. Did these people exist merely to humiliate him every time they met?
‘Monseigneur de Bouville must have thought she might behave like this,’ said the bearded brother, ‘for he says in his letter: “If Dame Marie, as is very likely, refuses to see the Seigneur Guccio …” Do you know why he should have written like that?’
‘No, I don’t,’ replied Guccio. ‘But she must have made her position with regard to me perfectly clear to Messire de Bouville for him to be so sure of it.’
‘And yet she has no other man in mind,’ repeated the bearded brother.
Guccio was getting angry. His dark eyebrows contracted about the vertical line that marked his forehead. This time he really had the right to act towards Marie without scruple. She should be paid for her cruelty with even greater cruelty.
‘What about my son?’ he asked.
‘He’s here. We brought him with us.’
In the next room the child, who was inscribed on the list of kings and whom the whole of France thought had died nine years ago, was watching the clerk doing his accounts and playing with a goose-quill. Jean de Cressay opened the door.
‘Jeannot, come here,’ he said.
Guccio, interested in his own reactions, managed to summon up a little emotion. ‘My son, I’m going to see my son,’ he thought. In fact he really felt nothing at all. And yet he had so often longed for this moment. But he had not expected the heavy little countryman’s footsteps he heard approaching.
The boy came in. He was wearing short breeches and a linen smock; his rebellious lock of hair lay askew on his pale forehead. A real little peasant.
For a moment the three men were embarrassed, and the child was well aware of it. Pierre pushed him towards Guccio.
‘Jeannot, this is …’
He had to say something, tell Jeannot who Guccio was. And what else could he tell him but the truth?
‘This is your father.’
Guccio had foolishly expected transports, open arms, tears. Little Jeannot looked up at him with astonished blue eyes.
‘But I was told my father was dead,’ he said.
This was a shock to Guccio; he suddenly felt furiously angry.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ Jean de Cressay interrupted hastily. ‘He was travelling and couldn’t send news. Isn’t that right, friend Guccio?’
‘I wonder how many lies they’ve brought him up on?’ Guccio thought. ‘Patience, I must have patience. How wicked to tell him his father was dead!’ And since he had to say something, he said: ‘How very fair he is.’
‘Yes, exactly like our uncle Pierre, the brother of our late father, whose name I bear,’ replied the bearded brother.
‘Jeannot, come to me, come,’ said Guccio.
The boy obeyed, but his rough little hand seemed ill at ease in Guccio’s and he wiped his cheek after being kissed.
‘I’d like to have him for a few days,’ Guccio went on, ‘to take him to see my uncle Tolomei, who wants to make his acquaintance.’
And, as he said this, Guccio automatically closed his left eye, like Tolomei.
Jeannot looked at him with his mouth open. What a lot of uncles there were! Everyone always seemed to be talking of uncles.
‘I’ve got an uncle in Paris who sends me presents,’ he said in a clear voice.
‘He’s the one we’re going to visit. If your uncles have no objection. You see nothing against it, do you?’ Guccio asked.
‘Of course not,’ replied Pierre de Cressay. ‘Monseigneur de Bouville mentions it in his letter and tells us to permit it.’
It was obvious that the Cressays never did anything without Bouville’s permission.
The bearded brother was already thinking of the presents the banker was bound to give his great-nephew. He might reasonably expect a purse of gold, which would be particularly welcome since a murrain had fallen on the livestock this year. And – who could tell? – the banker was old and might well intend mentioning the child in his will.
Guccio was already savouring his vengeance. But had vengeance ever consoled for lost love?
It was Guccio’s horse and the Pope’s harness that first attracted the boy. He had never seen so fine a mount. He also stared with a mixture of curiosity and admiration at the clothes this father who had fallen to him from the skies was wearing. He gazed at the skin-tight breeches that had no single crease at the knee, the boots of dark, supple leather, and the short travelling coat of a curiously shot material, leaf-brown in colour, closed high in front by a line of small buttons held in loops, and with a little hood that fell back from the neck.
The Count de Bouville’s sergeant-at-arms was much more brightly and splendidly dressed in his azure-blue coat gleaming in the sunshine, with its braided scallops at wrist and thigh and its lordly coat of arms embroidered on the breast. But the boy had realized at once that it was Guccio who gave the sergeant orders, and he was lost in admiration for a father who spoke as a master to someone so resplendently clothed.
They had already ridden some four leagues. In the inn at Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche where they halted, Guccio, in a naturally authoritarian voice, ordered an omelette with herbs, a capon roasted on the spit, and a cream cheese. And wine. The alacrity displayed by the servants still further increased Jeannot’s respect for him.
‘Why do you speak differently from us, Messire?’ he asked. ‘You don’t pronounce your words in the same way we do.’
Guccio was rather hurt at this remark from his own son about his Tuscan accent.
‘Because I come from Siena, in Italy, which is my country,’ he replied proudly. ‘And you will become a Sienese too, a free citizen of a town in which we are powerful. And now don’t call me Messire, but Padre.’
‘Padre,’ the boy repeated docilely.
Then Guccio, the sergeant and the boy sat down to their meal. And while they were waiting for the omelette, Guccio began to teach Jeannot the names of common objects in his own tongue.
‘Tavola,’ he said, putting his hand on the edge of the table, ‘bottiglia,’ picking up a bottle, ‘vino …’
He felt rather embarrassed by the boy’s presence, and found it difficult to be himself; he was paralysed by the fear of being unable to make himself loved, and also of being unable to love. Though he kept on saying to himself ‘This is my son,’ he felt nothing except a profound hostility to the people who had brought him up.
Jeannot had never drunk wine before. At Cressay they drank only cider, or even skimmed milk like peasants. He drank a few mouthfuls. He was accustomed to the omelette and the cream cheese, but the roast capon made it like a feast day. He enjoyed this meal taken on the road in the middle of the afternoon. He was not frightened, and the excitement of the adventure made him forget to think of his mother. He had been told he would see her again in a few days’ time. The names Paris and Siena meant little to him and he had no precise idea of how far away they were. Next Saturday he would be back beside the Mauldre and would be able to say to the miller’s daughter and the wheelwright’s sons: ‘I am Sienese.’ Nor would he have to explain matters, since they knew even less about these things than he did.
When they had swallowed their last mouthful, wiped their daggers on pieces of bread and replaced them at their belts, they remounted their horses. Guccio lifted the boy and placed him in front of him across the saddle-bow.32
The heavy meal and above all the wine, which he had now tasted for the first time, had made the child drowsy. Before they had gone half a league, he fell asleep, indifferent to the jolting of the trotting horse.
There is nothing so moving as a sleeping child, particularly during the day, when adults are awake and about their business. Guccio held the jolting, swaying, abandoned little body steady. It was already quite heavy. He instinctively caressed with his chin the fair hair that seemed to be seeking shelter against him and drew his arm closer about the boy, as if to make the little, round, drowsy head lie even closer against his chest. There was a smell of childhood about the little sleeping body. And suddenly Guccio felt himself to be really a father, and proud of it, and tears misted his eyes.
‘Jeannot, my Jeannot, my Giannino,’ he murmured, putting his lips to the warm, silky hair.
He had reined his horse back into a walk and signed to the sergeant to do likewise, so as not to wake the boy and at the same time to prolong his own happiness. What did it matter when they arrived? Tomorrow Giannino would wake up in the house in the Rue des Lombards, which would seem a palace to him; servants would fuss over him, wash him, dress him like a little lord, and a fairy-tale life would begin for him.
Marie de Cressay refolded the now useless dress under the eyes of her silent but disappointed maid. For the maid had also dreamed of a different life to which she would follow her mistress, and there was a certain reproof in her attitude.
But Marie had stopped trembling and her eyes were dry; she had made her decision. She had only a few days to wait, a week at most. This morning she had been taken unawares; it was those nine years in which she had turned the same thoughts over and over in her mind which had made her so nervous and afraid and induced her to give so absurd an answer, so crazy a refusal.
It was because she had been thinking only of the oath Madame de Bouville – that wicked woman – had made her swear so long ago; and of her threats: ‘If you insist on seeing this man again … it will be his death.’
But the years had gone by. Two kings had succeeded to the throne and no one had ever uttered a word. And Madame de Bouville was dead. Besides, did that terrible oath agree with the laws of God? Was it not a sin to prevent a human being avowing her spiritual troubles to her confessor? Even nuns could be relieved of their vows. Surely no one had the right to separate a wife from her husband? That was not Christian either. And the Count de Bouville was not a bishop, nor indeed was he anything like so terrifying as his wife had been.
Marie ought to have thought of all these things this morning; she should have realized that she could not live without Guccio, that her place was beside him, and that when Guccio came to fetch her nothing in the world – oaths taken in the past, the secrets of the Crown, the fear of what men might do, or even the punishment of God, were it to be inflicted – ought to prevent her going with him.
She would not lie to Guccio. A man who still loved you after nine years, had taken no other woman, and had come back to look for you, had a loyal and upright heart, like a knight who surmounted every ordeal. Such a man could share a secret and keep it. Besides, what right had she to lie to him, to let him believe his son was alive and that he was clasping him in his arms, when it was not true?
Marie would explain to Guccio that their child, their first-born – for, in her thoughts, the dead child was already only their first-born – had been given and exchanged by a tragic concatenation of events to save the life of the real King of France. And she would ask Guccio to share her oath. Together they would bring up the little posthumous Jean, who had reigned during the first five days of his life, until the day came when the barons sought him out to give him back his crown. And the other children they would have would be like real brothers to the King of France one day. If things could all go wrong through the agency of a blind Fate, why should they not also go right?
All this Marie would explain to Guccio, when he came back in a few days’ time, next week, and brought Jeannot with him, as had been agreed with her brothers.
And then their happiness, which had been so long deferred, could really begin. And if all joy on earth had to be paid for by an equal weight of suffering, then they would both have earned all their future happiness in advance. Would Guccio want to live at Cressay? Clearly not. In Paris? It would be dangerous for little Jean and they must not defy the Count de Bouville from too close at hand, after all. They would go to Italy. Guccio would take her to that country of which she knew nothing but the beautiful cloth it produced and its clever goldsmiths’ work. She already loved Italy because the man God had selected for her came from that country. Marie was already travelling in her thoughts beside her recovered husband. In a week’s time everything would be all right; she had only a week to wait.
Alas, in love, it is not enough to have the same desires; they must also be expressed at the same time.