The King Without a Kingdom Read Online Free Page B

ancient stones of a Roman arena, I remember the wonder that filled me suddenly, the wonder of being alive at the centre of the big, wide world, to breathe, to see the sky; I remember this feeling came to me on summer evenings, when the light is long and I was put to bed well before nightfall. The bees buzzed in a vine that climbed the wall beneath my room, the shadow slowly filled the oval courtyard with its enormous stones; birds flew across the still-light sky and the first star appeared amidst the rose-tinged clouds. I had a great childish need to say thank you, and my mother made it clear to me that it was to God I should give thanks, the Organizer of all this beauty. And that thought has never left me.
    On this very day, all along our route, often I feel a thank you in my heart for this warm weather, for these russet-coloured forests we ride through, for these still-green pastures, for these loyal servants who escort me, for these fine, fattened horses that I see trotting alongside my palanquin. I enjoy watching the faces of men, the movements of the beasts, the shapes of the trees, all this infinite variety that is the infinitely wonderful work of God.
    All our doctors who fight over theology in closed classrooms, and cram themselves full of empty words, and shout bitter abuse at each other, and who bore everyone to death inventing words to name otherwise what we already knew before them, all of these people would be better off contemplating nature, thereby healing their minds. I have the theology that I was taught, handed down from the fathers of the Church; and I have no desire to change it …
    Did you know that I could have been pope? Yes, my nephew. Many tell me so, as they tell me that I could yet be pope if I outlast Innocent. It will be God’s will. I do not complain about what he has made me. I thank him that he put me where he has put me, and that he has kept me on to be the age I am, an age that few attain: fifty-five years, my dear nephew, that is my age, and in as fine form as you see me. That is also the Lord’s blessing. Those whom I haven’t met for ten years cannot believe their eyes: that I have changed so little in appearance, my cheeks still as rosy, and my beard scarcely whitened.
    The idea of being made or not being made pope only bothers me, in truth – I confide this to you as a relative – when it occurs to me that I could act more wisely than the one who wears the papal tiara. And yet I never had that feeling with Clement VI. He fully understood that the pope should be a monarch above all monarchs, God’s right-hand man. On a day when Jean Birel or some other preacher of asceticism accused him of being too extravagant, and too generous to the supplicants, he responded: ‘Nobody should leave the prince’s company dissatisfied.’ And, turning to me, he added between his teeth: ‘My predecessors didn’t know how to be pope.’ And during the Great Plague, as I was saying, he really proved he was the best. I don’t believe, in all honesty, that I could have done as much as he, and I thanked God, once again, that He hadn’t designated me to lead an ailing Christendom through this ordeal.
    Not once did Clement abandon his majesty; and indeed he demonstrated that he was the Holy Father, the father of all Christians, and even father to all others, as when peoples almost everywhere, but especially in the Rhineland provinces of Mainz and Worms, turned against the Jews, accusing them of causing the scourge, he condemned such persecutions. He went further and took the Jews into his own protection; he excommunicated their tormentors; he offered asylum to the hounded Jews and relocated them within his states, where it must be said they re-established prosperity in just a few years.
    But why was I going on so long about the plague? Ah, yes! Because of the dire consequences it had for the French crown, and for King John himself. Indeed, towards the end of the epidemic, during the autumn of 1349,