The Poisoned Crown. Морис Дрюон

Clémence was also behaving in exemplary fashion. Lodged in the stern cabin, a state apartment arranged for royal passengers in the stern-castle, she was endeavouring to calm her ladies who, like a flock of frightened sheep, moaned at every wave.

      Clémence had uttered no single word of regret when she was told that her chests of dresses and jewels had gone overboard.

      ‘I would have given twice as much,’ she merely said, ‘if it could have saved the poor sailors from being injured by the mast.’

      She was less afraid of the storm than of the augury she saw in it.

      This marriage was more than I deserved,’ she thought; ‘I have been too happy in the thought of it and have sinned from pride; God will shipwreck me because I do not deserve to become a queen.’

      Upon the third morning, when the ship was in a temporary lull, though the sea gave no sign of abating nor the sun of appearing, fat Bouville, his feet bare, dishevelled, wearing only a shirt, was discovered kneeling on the deck with his arms crossed.

      ‘What on earth are you doing there, Messire?’ asked Princess Clémence.

      ‘I’m doing what Monsieur Saint Louis did, Madam, when he was nearly drowned off Cyprus. He promised to give a silver ship weighing five marcs³ to Monsieur Saint Nicolas de Warangeville, if God would bring him safely back to France. It was Messire de Joinville who told me the story.’

      ‘I join you in your vow, Bouville,’ replied Clémence, ‘and since our ship is under the protection of Saint John the Baptist, I promise, if we survive and I am mercifully permitted to give the King of France a son, to call him John.’

      She at once knelt down and began praying.

      Towards midday the violence of the sea began to decline and everyone became more hopeful. Then the sun burst through the clouds; land was sighted. The captain joyfully recognized the coast of Provence and, as they drew nearer, the calanques of Cassis. He was extremely proud of having kept to his course.

      ‘You will land us here upon the coast at once, I presume, Master Mariner,’ cried Bouville.

      ‘I must take you to Marseilles, Messire,’ replied the captain, ‘and we are not far from it. In any case I no longer have sufficient anchors to lie off those cliffs.’

      A little before evening the San Giovanni, under oars, was lying off the port of Marseilles. A boat was sent off to warn the city authorities to lower the heavy chain which protected the entrance to the harbour between the Malbert tower and Fort Saint-Nicolas. The Governor, the sheriff, and magistrates (Marseilles was at that time an Angevin city) came off in a strong mistral to welcome the niece of their suzerain lord, the King of Naples.

      Upon the quay labourers from the salt-pans, fishermen, makers of oars and rigging, caulkers, money-changers, merchants from the ghetto, clerks from the Genoese and Siennese banks, gaped in astonishment at the huge ship, now a sail-less, dismasted wreck, as the sailors danced and embraced each other on the deck, crying that a miracle had occurred.

      The Neapolitan gentlemen and the ladies of the suite endeavoured to put some order in their dress.

      Brave Bouville, who had lost a stone during the voyage and whose clothes now hung loose upon him, continually assured those about him that it had been his idea to make a vow and that it was this which had prevented their being shipwrecked, that everyone, in fact, owed their life to him.

      ‘Messire Hugues,’ Guccio replied with an ironic gleam in his eye, ‘there never has been a storm, from what I hear, in which someone has not made a vow similar to yours. How then do you explain the fact that so many ships manage to go to the bottom all the same?’

      ‘It must be because they have a miscreant like you on board!’ replied the ex-Chamberlain with a smile.

      Guccio was the first to jump ashore. He leaped lightly from the shrouds in order to prove how vigorous he was. There was a rending cry. After several days upon a pitching deck, Guccio had miscalculated the earth’s stability; his foot had slipped and he had fallen into the sea. He barely escaped being crushed between the stone quay and the ship’s hull. The sea around him at once turned red; in his fall he had torn himself on an iron hook. He was pulled out in a half-fainting condition, bleeding, his thigh cut to the bone. He was immediately taken to the Hôtel-Dieu.

       3

       The Hôtel-Dieu

      THE HUGE WARD FOR men was like a cathedral nave. At the end of it was an altar where four masses, vespers, and evensong were celebrated every day. The privileged patients occupied little cells, called ‘rooms of consideration’, which lined the walls; the rest were lying two in a bed and head to foot. The monks, in long brown habits, were continuously passing up and down the centre aisle, either to sing the office, to attend to the sick or serve the meals. Religious exercises were intimately related to medical treatment; the groans of the sufferers were mingled with verses of the psalms; the odour of incense could not overcome the atrocious smell of fever and gangrene; death was a public spectacle. Inscriptions, painted in high gothic letters upon the walls, prepared the patient for death rather than recovery.⁴

      For three weeks Guccio had lain there in a cell, gasping for breath in the appalling heat of summer, which always has a tendency to make illness more exhausting and hospitals more disagreeable. He looked sadly at the rays of the sun which entered by the windows pierced high in the wall and threw large golden patches upon this assembly of human desolation. He could make no movement without groaning; the balms and elixirs of the nursing brothers burnt him like so many flames, and every dressing was a time of torture. No one seemed to be able to tell him whether the bone was affected; but he felt sure that the wound was more than a flesh-wound, since he nearly fainted whenever they touched his thigh or the small of his back. The doctors and surgeons assured him that he was in no mortal danger, that at his age one recovered from anything, and that God had performed many another miracle, as He had for that caulker’s boy who had come in the other day, carrying his intestines in his hands, and who had left after a short time even gayer than before. Guccio despaired none the less. He had been there three weeks already and there seemed no reason to suppose he would not be there for another three, or even three months, or that he would not be lame and crippled for ever.

      He saw himself condemned for the rest of his life to crouching huddled behind a money-changer’s counter in Marseilles because he could not make the journey to Paris. If, that was, he died from no other disease. Every morning he saw one or two corpses carried out. They had already turned a horrible black colour, since there were always, as in every Mediterranean port, a few cases of plague about. And all this because he had wished to show off by jumping on to the quay before his companions. And when he had just escaped shipwreck too!

      He was furious at fate and his own stupidity. He sent for the letter-writer almost every day and dictated to him long letters for Marie de Cressay which he sent by the couriers of the Lombard banks to the branch at Neauphle, so that the chief clerk might give them secretly to the girl.

      With all the emphasis and richness of image which Italians use in speaking of love, Guccio sent the most passionate declarations. He assured her he only wished to get well for her sake, for the happiness of seeing her again, looking upon her, and cherishing her day by day for ever. He besought her to be faithful to the pact they had sworn, and promised her enduring happiness. ‘You dominate my whole heart, as no one else will ever do, and if you should fail me, my life too would fail.’

      Now that he was confined through his own stupidity to a bed in the Hôtel-Dieu, he was presumptuous enough to begin to doubt everyone and everything and to fear that the girl he loved was no longer waiting for him. Marie would grow tired of an absent lover, would fall for some young provincial squire, a huntsman and champion in tournaments.