Paris: The Novel Page 6

  “I was wondering, mon Père, whether I might show this lady the chapel above.”

  “The royal chapel is not open, young man,” the priest replied sharply. And that, she thought, was the end of it. But not at all.

  “Forgive me, mon Père, my name is Roland de Cygne. My father is the lord de Cygne in the valley of the Loire. I am his second son and plan to take Holy Orders.”

  The priest paused and looked at him carefully.

  “I have heard of your family, monsieur,” he said quietly. “Please accompany me …” And minutes later, they were in the royal chapel. “We can stay only a moment,” the priest whispered.

  The sunlight was coming in through the tall windows, filling the high, blue and gold spaces with celestial light. If the lower chapel had seemed like a magical wood, this was the hallway to heaven.

  Her young student, who spoke so well and smelled so good, had the power to open the secret gardens of earthly delights and royal sanctuaries. That was the moment when she decided to try him as a lover. Besides, she’d never had an aristocrat before.

  As she stared at him now, in the early morning light, he opened his eyes. They were tawny brown.

  “It’s time to go,” she whispered.

  “Not quite.”

  “I mustn’t get caught.”

  “Don’t make a sound, then.” He grinned.

  “We’ll have to be quick,” she said, as she lay down beside him.

  Afterward he told her that he must study the following night, but could come to her the night after that. She told him yes, then led him downstairs into the yard. Like most of the better merchant’s houses in Paris, her uncle’s house was tall. The front door gave directly onto the street, but behind the house there was a yard with a storehouse, above which she slept, and a gateway to the alley that ran along the back. Drawing the bolts to the gate softly back, she pushed him through, and quickly bolted the gate behind him. From the house, her uncle’s snores could still be heard.

  As Roland de Cygne made his way along the alley, he felt pretty pleased with himself, and his conquest. Before this, he’d had only brief and fumbling encounters with farm girls and serving wenches, so Martine was a good start to what he hoped would be a fine career as a lover. Of course, she was only a young woman of the bourgeois, merchant class, but good practice. And he supposed that she in turn must be quite excited to have a boy of noble blood for a lover.

  He thought he’d handled his first approach to her especially well. As for telling her that he was descended from the hero of the Song of Roland, that had been only a slight embroidery on the truth. As a child he’d asked why he was named Roland, and his father had explained: “When your grandfather went on crusade, he had a wonderful horse called Roland, after the hero of the tale. That horse went with him all the way to the Holy Land and back, and he deserves to be remembered. It’s a good name, too. I’d have given it to your brother, but the eldest in our family is always called Jean. So I gave it to you.”

  “I’m named after a horse?”

  “One of the noblest warhorses ever to go on crusade. What more do you want?”

  Roland had understood. But he didn’t think he was going to get many girls by telling them he was named after a horse.

  He cut through an alley back into the rue du Temple. The sky was brightening over the gabled houses. The city gates were open by now, but there was hardly anyone about. The sound of the dawn chorus was all around, bringing as it always did a little thrill to his heart. He sniffed the air. As usual in the city streets, he could smell urine, dung and woodsmoke; but the delicious smell of baking bread also wafted past him, and the sweet scent of a honeysuckle bush from somewhere nearby.

  Roland hadn’t wanted to go to Paris. But his father had insisted: “There’s nothing for you here, my son,” he’d said. “But I think you have more brains than your brother, and that in Paris you could do great things for the honor of your family. Why, you might even surpass your grandfather.” That would be a fine thing indeed.

  Roland’s grandfather had been favored by history. After the mighty Charlemagne had died, and his empire crumbled back into provinces and tribal territories built on the ruins of ancient Rome, the kings of the Franks were often masters of little more than the Paris region, known as the Île-de-France, while huge domains, ruled by rich and powerful feudal families, encircled them: Provence and Aquitaine in the south; Celtic Brittany on the northern Atlantic coast; Champagne to the east; and below it, the tribal lands of Burgundy.

  And with Charlemagne gone, the terrible Viking Norsemen had begun their raids. On one shameful occasion, Paris had bought them off and sent them to ravage Burgundy—the Burgundians had never forgiven the Parisians for that. Even when, finally, the Norsemen had settled down in Normandy, their rulers were still restless. And when William of Normandy had conquered England in 1066, his family’s wealth and power had become greater than that of the French king in Paris.

  But worst of all—more greedy, ruthless and frankly vicious—were the rulers of a smaller territory below Brittany, on the mouth of the River Loire: the counts of Anjou. Ambition had led the Plantagenets, as they were called, into marriage with the ruling families of Normandy and Aquitaine. Worse still, by outrageous dynastic luck they’d gotten their hands on the throne of England too.

  “By your grandfather’s day,” Roland’s father had told him, “the Plantagenets had almost surrounded the Île-de-France and they were ready to squeeze.”

  France had been saved by a remarkable man. King Philip Augustus of the Capet dynasty, the grandfather of the present king, had been brave and cunning. He’d gone on crusade with England’s Plantagenet king, Richard the Lionheart, but he never missed a chance to set one Plantagenet against another. And when the heroic Lionheart was succeeded by his unpopular brother John, the wily French monarch had soon managed to kick him out of Normandy and even Anjou. Indeed, after John’s own English barons rebelled against him, it had looked for a moment as if the French kings might get England as well.

  And during all these years of strife, no one was more loyal to the French king than the lord de Cygne. He was only a poor knight. The warhorse Roland was his most valuable possession. But he had gone on crusade with Philip Augustus, and the king called him his friend. So although his small estate lay within Anjou, and the Plantagenets might take it away at any time, he stayed at the side of his king. And when Philip Augustus had triumphed, he was able to reward his modest friend with lands that more than doubled the family’s wealth.

  But the de Cygnes had not prospered since then. Roland’s father had sold some of his lands. Perhaps his brother could marry an heiress. That would be good. But there was something else that Roland could do for his family. He could rise in the Church.

  The universal Church was many things: a source of comfort and inspiration, of scholarship and dreams. For the crusading family of de Cygne, it now offered another life-giving support. There was money in the Church—a lot of it.

  Those who rose in the Church enjoyed the revenues of its vast estates. A bishop was a powerful man, and lived like a prince. Great churchmen could provide money for their families, and help them in every way. The vow of celibacy didn’t appeal to Roland. But fortunately, despite their vows, many a bishop had left illegitimate children. The Church provided the educated class, and the great administrators of the crown. For a clever fellow, the Church was a way to fortune.

  Roland was ready to do it. He wanted to be a success. Yet he still had one dream, a crusader’s dream, that he supposed could never be realized.

  He looked up the street. A quarter mile away, between the narrow canyon of wood-beamed, gabled houses, he could see one of the gates in the city wall. Philip Augustus had built that mighty stone wall, enclosing both banks of the Seine in a huge oval. The gate was open. His way led in the opposite direction, but he couldn’t resist it. He walked toward the open gate.

  As he passed through the gateway, the road continued straight ahead.
On his left behind some orchards, he could see the Priory of Saint Martin in the Fields. There were a number of walled sanctuaries both inside and outside the city gates, containing important monasteries and convents. But the great enclave that had drawn him lay a short way ahead on his right. It was built like a fortress. Two castle towers rose fearsomely within. Its mighty doorways were barred, and bolted. Roland stood in the road and stared.

  This was the Temple. A country in itself.

  It was the Crusades that had created the Knights Templar. They began as security guards, bringing bullion safely across dangerous territories to the armies that needed it. Soon they were the guardians of huge deposits in many lands. From there, it was only a step to being bankers. As a religious order, they paid no taxes. By the reign of Philip Augustus, the Templars were one of the richest and most powerful organizations in Christendom. They answered only to the pope himself, and to God. And within the mighty Templars was a cadre of the most awesome warriors in the world: the Temple Knights.

  The noble Knights of the Temple never surrendered. They were never ransomed. They fought, always, to the death they did not fear. To beat them, you had to kill them all.

  To join them, you had to undergo an initiation so secret that no detail had ever leaked out. But once accepted, you were one of the innermost, sacred circle of the world of the crusades.

  Roland had always dreamed of being a Temple Knight since he was a little boy. It was the only way he could imagine of equaling his crusading grandfather. He’d still dreamed of it before he came to Paris. But his father wouldn’t hear of it, for a good and simple reason.

  Templars had no money. When the Temple Knights took their vows of poverty, they meant it. The order was rich beyond imagining; but its great men were poor. No use to the family of Roland de Cygne.

  So now, as the spring morning light fell on the Temple towers, Roland gazed a little while and then turned away, back into the city. If the Temple had been his boyhood dream, he had to confess that life in the streets of Paris wasn’t so bad. He could enjoy Martine, for instance.

  He thought of the day ahead, and smiled to himself. He liked Martine. But when he had told her he had to study the coming night, he had lied.

  The sinking sun was throwing a huge red light over the rooftops, and the shadows in the streets were lengthening when Roland set out from his lodgings on the Left Bank. They lay just a hundred yards toward the setting sun from the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, on the broad top of the hill, where once the Roman Forum had stood. Ruined for centuries, its rubble smoothed over to a gentler slope, the Forum was covered with religious houses now. A Roman street down to the river remained, but had gained a new name: since pilgrims bound for Compostela passed this way, it was called the rue Saint-Jacques.

  Roland started down it. There were students everywhere. Recently, as the university shifted from the area of Notre Dame to the Left Bank, the hillside was becoming covered with the small colleges where the students lived and worked. The college of the king’s chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, fifty yards away on his left, was the first; but many others were springing up.

  He continued down the long slope, past the Abbot of Cluny’s palace, and the parish church of Saint-Séverin until, reaching the river, he prepared to cross the old bridge to the island, where the sunset’s rays were turning the western front of Notre Dame into a molten mass of red and gold.

  Roland felt excited. He was going to see another woman.

  His story that he must study tonight was easy for Martine to believe. The university students worked hard. For Roland, however, learning had come easily. Even before he came to Paris at the age of fifteen, a local priest had taught him to speak and read Latin thoroughly—for the university courses were almost all taught in Latin. He had completed the traditional trivium, of grammar, logic and rhetoric, Plato and Aristotle—a syllabus that dated back to Roman times—in less than the usual time, and moved swiftly on to the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. He did the work so fast that his fellow students called him Abelard. But Roland was no philosopher, and had no wish to be. He had a quick mind and a wonderful memory, that was all. Soon he’d complete the quadrivium and become a master. After that, he meant to study law.

  So tonight he was free to make love to that girl he’d picked up in the rue Saint-Honoré.

  He’d met her three days ago. One of the law professors at the university, a man he wished to cultivate, had asked him to take a letter to a priest on the Right Bank.

  The great Cemetery of the Innocents lay just west of the city’s central line, only three hundred yards from the river, on the rue Saint-Denis. If one followed that street out through the city wall, it led northward for miles, all the way to the great Abbey of Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were buried. But the occupants of the Innocents were of a much humbler sort. Its ten-foot walls enclosed the mass graves of the poor. Beside those sad walls, however, there was a pleasant church, where Roland found the priest, a small elderly man with a scholarly face, who thanked him most gratefully for his trouble.

  On the western side of the cemetery lay a much more cheerful place. The open area of Les Halles was the city’s biggest market. As he wasn’t in a hurry, Roland had wandered about there for a while, admiring the colorful stalls. He’d just been inspecting a booth selling fine Italian leather when, glancing toward a group of merchants talking together under an archway, he noticed that one of them was staring at him intently. He wasn’t large, but he stooped forward in a way that suggested a menacing energy. His face was partly covered by a short, straggly gray beard. He had a beak of a nose, which wasn’t quite straight. His eyes were hard. And they were looking at him as though he were a viper to be crushed.

  It was Martine’s uncle. Roland knew what he looked like because, out of curiosity, he’d waited nearby one morning and watched him leave his house. So far as he knew, the merchant didn’t even know of his existence. But still the eyes glared at him.

  Did the merchant recognize him? How much did he know? He moved slowly away, trying to take no notice of the dangerous stare. He went behind another stall from where he could observe the merchant unseen. The man’s piercing stare had been transferred to another part of the market now. As far as Roland could see, Martine’s uncle was looking at that in exactly the same way. He hoped so. But he’d left Les Halles all the same.

  That’s when he’d gone into the tavern around the corner in the rue Saint-Honoré. The girl had been working in there. She wasn’t any relation of the innkeeper, just a servant girl. A bold girl, with a mass of thick black hair, and dark eyes to match, and large white teeth. He noticed one or two men try to flirt with her, and that she cut them off firmly. But from the moment their eyes met, he saw that she was interested in him. He’d stayed there quite a while. She’d told him she’d be free tonight. Her name was Louise.

  Now, as the evening sun burnished the face of Notre Dame, Roland crossed cheerfully to the Île de la Cité. Before continuing over to the Right Bank, he paused for a moment. On the left, downstream, was a bridge supporting a dozen water mills, behind which lay quays where the boats unloaded salt and herring from the Normandy coast. Past that, the narrow western tip of the island divided the Seine’s waters, gleaming golden in the sunset. And a little farther downstream, where the stout wall of Philip Augustus reached the riverbank, a small, square, high-turreted fort called the Louvre, equipped with massive chains that could be drawn across the river, stood guardian to the sacred city, protecting her from the rough invaders who might want to ravish her.

  Roland gazed westward at the warm sun, and smiled. It struck him as very convenient that Martine lived on the east side of the Right Bank, and Louise on the western side. With luck, he thought, he might be able to go from one to the other for some time.

  Martine was quite excited the following night as she waited for her lover to arrive. She had some sweetmeats and a jug of wine on the small table in her room. She had gone to confession the day
before, and as always after penance and absolution, she felt a tingling sense of freshness, as if the world had been made anew. Despite the young man’s faults, she even found herself trembling a little in anticipation.

  She waited until darkness had fallen. Two of the servants slept in the attic of the main house, a third in the kitchen. The kitchen door was locked and bolted now, and the shutters closed. Her uncle would still be in his counting house, but that looked onto the street at the front.

  She put on a dark cloak and slipped down to the yard. Trailing clouds covered the moon. She was almost invisible. She went to the gate that gave onto the alley and slipped the bolts.

  Roland was waiting. He stepped swiftly into the yard. A moment later they were stealing up the winding stair to her room.

  The candle gave a warm light. The room was snug. Roland seemed in a cheerful mood. Quite pleased with himself, in fact. He was delighted with the little meal she’d prepared.

  “I went to confession yesterday,” she said with a smile, as she poured him more wine.

  “Have you so many sins to confess?”

  “Just you.”

  “Ah. A mortal sin. Did you receive penance and absolution?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you mean to sin again?”

  “Perhaps. If you’re nice to me.” She looked at him curiously. “What about you? Do you go to confession?”

  “Now and then.”

  “Well, I should hope so, Roland,” she teased him gently. “Don’t forget you are tonsured. You are going to be a priest.”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged. “These sins of the flesh are not so important.”

  “Is that what I am, then? A sin of the flesh?”

  “According to theology.” He looked away for a moment, and then continued almost to himself: “A woman with a husband would be a greater sin. A widow is different. And it’s not as if I’d seduced a girl from a noble family.”