The Judas Cloth (66 page)

‘The meeting is at three and we have still to make a list of Spanish nominees.’ Away he raced.

Prospero smiled. ‘The English know how to spike democracy’s guns. Grassi’s taking lessons.’

The rain had grown heavier, so they hugged the wall. Pinned to a church door, a notice declared a book made up from the articles in the
Allgemeine
Zeitung
to be on the Index. Lines were being drawn. Yesterday, early arrivals among the Council Fathers had been addressed by the Pope and a Brief read out, laying down the rules of procedure. Some, said Prospero over his shoulder, were upset. They had expected to draw up their own rules like at Trent. ‘An absurd idea! Trent lasted
years
and we haven’t got years. We’re near my place. May I offer you lunch?’

Nicola accepted and the two walked up a spacious stone stairway which had lately been used as a privy. Escutcheons with the arms of the
palazzo
’s
successive owners decorated the walls.

Over the meal, he learned that some foreign bishops had expressed resentment at the Pope’s setting the agenda. Others jibbed at having to obtain permission before leaving Rome, at their post being censored, and at the ban on printing anything to do with the Council. What did they expect, exclaimed Prospero. ‘It’s not a parliament, after all!’

‘But earlier Councils were more free!’

‘Oh, Councils have a turbulent history, which is why we plan to keep this one in control.’ It should not be difficult, explained Prospero, for about three hundred foreigners were to be the Pope’s boarders, kept here at his expense.
They
would hardly bite the hand that fed them! Curial cardinals too would be reluctant to show disloyalty.

Then he made a suggestion. Nicola, whose opinions would be
assumed to coincide with Amandi’s, should let people go on thinking this. It would be useful to His Holiness to have someone privy to the cabals of the Liberal Minority. ‘Simply pretend to be one of them. To be sure,’ Prospero admitted, ‘voting will be public. But by the time a significant vote reveals your true allegiance, you will be able to claim that the Holy Spirit led you to change it. Indeed, this could usefully influence other waverers.’

‘I am not a waverer, Monsignore!’

‘I’m sorry. Look, Nicola, it was a
lapsus.
I only meant …’

‘That you can handle me! You think that of the whole Council. You and your friends plan to run it by trickery. Well, perhaps you can, Monsignore, but I shan’t help you.’ Nicola, who had not meant to say any of this, felt his anger rising. As he stood up, his chair fell, knocked something over and brought things to a head, since now he must either apologise or storm out. He stormed out.

In the street, his temper was doused by the rain. Dodging from doorway to doorway, he had leisure to reflect that, not only had he said uncharitable things, he had made a tactical error. With hindsight, he should have accepted the role of traitor. After all, he need not play it. Instead, by staying friends with both sides, he could work for a reconciliation. The chance to do this had come his way – and must be got back. Painful or not, he must apologise. If he did not, some other bishop would be asked to betray the Liberals – and would do so. How, he wondered now, had he come to lose his temper? He had, just a while before, been feeling close to Prospero who had been speaking with passion and looking like his younger self. Humanity, he had warned, could be driven to despair. We were at the hub of things at a pivotal moment. ‘It’s like France in 1789,’ he had argued over the
crostini
, then developed this analogy over the rice, the roast eel, and the veal in Madeira sauce. Look at the parallels! No money in the Treasury, the monarch seeking support from the notables and they, namely us, thinking of their own interests. ‘You don’t think, do you, that the devil talks with a devilish voice? He talks about rights and episcopal privilege. Lucid and persuasive arguments led to 1789 and we are approaching the 1789 of the Church.’

Nicola, granting that there might be something to this, let his friend work at winning him over and realised, as he felt himself expand in the glow of his attentiveness, how he had been missing their closeness.
Possibly, he had seemed more sympathetic than he was. Encouraged, Prospero, having lined up all his points, turned, at the pudding, to the latest pasquinades.

Their butt was Bishop Dupanloup whose entourage of seven priests and many mounds of baggage had astounded the papal Customs. ‘He travels like an Egyptian bey and one can but wonder who pays. Could it be the French Emperor?’ The guess was perfidious. Dupanloup was staying at the Villa Grazioli. ‘He’s miles from the centre, which isn’t lost on the wags. “Who”, runs a joke, “is the most ex-centric bishop? The furthest from grace?” They’ve Latinised his name to “De pavone lupus”, implying that from a peacock vanity come wolfish ways or that he is the product of a mismatch …’

‘This is
low
!’
Nicola was indignant at the reference to the French bishop’s being a by-blow of the House of Rohan. The ‘wag’, it struck him, was probably Prospero himself.

‘I’m preparing you,’ said Prospero, ‘for the zoo which Rome now is – a place where the dove must deal with lupine peacocks.’ Then he made his proposal.

It was the feast of the Immaculate Conception: a day of rain and rising muck. Bells had pealed for an hour and the Council’s opening had been announced by a roar of canon from the Castel Sant’Angelo, whose name commemorated an angel’s appearance centuries before. The angel had been sheathing a sword and perhaps today’s swords too might be sheathed? Not everyone hoped for this. The young and buoyant rather favoured the red shirts, but were ready, for now, to enjoy the current show.

Eighty thousand people had squeezed into the basilica where few could hope to glimpse as much as a mitre.

Rain had curtailed the ceremony, but the procession was impressive, as over seven hundred Council Fathers in silver copes assembled above St Peter’s Portico, then descended the Royal Staircase. They were followed by the Pope, borne high on his
sede
gestatoria
surrounded by fan-bearers. Passing St Peter’s statue, they moved up the aisle – by now deep in a slush of mud – towards the high altar where the host was exposed behind the bronze columns of Bernini’s
baldacchino.
God, ran a whisper, was doubly present: as Pius-Deus and in the consecrated wafer.

Mastai’s revelling voice rang out in a strong chant; then the procession turned into the right transept which was to be the Council Chamber. It measured forty-five meters by twenty and through its opened doors the faithful glimpsed cushioned seats – green for bishops and red for cardinals – arranged lengthwise down the aisle.

Mass was celebrated. Then a bishop from Trent, site of the last Council, delivered a greeting. There was a rumour that he had been promised a cardinal’s hat if he would urge his fellows to define the controversial doctrine. Straining to hear, they realised that the
aula
’s acoustics were nil. What had he said?

The Pope chanted ‘
Adsumus
Domine
, here we are, oh Holy Spirit, gathered in Your name, though in the fetters of sin … Do not allow us to betray justice …’

The music thrummed on. How many hours more? A-a-a-a-a-a-a-amen and again amen! Seasoned in ceremony, did prelates here mentally hibernate? Certainly, their torpid minds feared lively ones – hence their dislike of Germans. Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans, by visiting Germany last summer, had incurred some of this. Just now, in the robing room, Cardinal Pitra, looking like a wizened choirboy, had sidled up to him to hiss in his face: ‘
Wissenschaft
, Monsignore!
Wissenschaft
!’ Perhaps he took it for a vice or a disease? His teeth were black-veined and yellow like a clutch of wasps.

Dupanloup prayed for humility – yet, felt that politics could be forced on a man. Two months ago he had gone to see Louis Napoleon at Saint Cloud. The Emperor did not relish Mastai’s bullying of French bishops. If provoked, he might again withdraw his troops and this time the consequences could be fatal. Feeling him out, Dupanloup had concluded that the threat was real. Paradoxically, this made it harder to stand up to Mastai. For how hand him over to his enemies?

Yet the Pope himself failed to see that public opinion in France must
be appeased. Indeed once, when Dupanloup mentioned this, he had said, ‘Ah, you mean the rabble? Do you suggest, Monseigneur, that God’s Vicar should bow to their whims?’

‘No,
Santità
, but in Paris …’

The Paris rabble, said Mastai, was worse than our own. Two Archbishops of that city had been murdered in the last twenty years! ‘Things go in threes! You should warn your friend Darboy!’ And, horrifyingly, the fat old pontiff had begun to giggle. ‘The rabble may get
him
too if he tries using it against us.’ It was heartbreaking. Was senility now the norm here? ‘
Wissenschaft
!’ The spittly cardinal could have been cleaning his mouth.

The service was inaudible. Could the poor acoustics in this Council Chamber be deliberate? A way to muffle dissent and make us all harmonise like bells?

Now, with much shuffling and rustling, the Council Fathers filed up to kiss the Pope’s hand, knee or – according to rank – toe. In the gallery reserved for lay dignitaries sat the ex-King of Naples, the Empress of Austria, the Czar of Russia’s sister, the former Duke and Duchess of Parma, and other ornaments of old Europe. Glittering like amphibians, they were perhaps dreaming of a time when their kind had been secure in its own element.

Monsieur de Banneville was doyen of the diplomatic corps. The Emperor, who had for a while upset Pope Pius by sending him
free-thinkers
, now sent aristocrats – perhaps to satisfy in small ways a man he planned to throw to the wolves? Among whom, thought Dupanloup who knew his nickname, Pius is wrong to count me. He would know his friends better if he had laboured to more purpose on the political treadmill.

Dupanloup had learned about
that
when helping Prince Talleyrand de Périgord to make a Christian death. Thirty-one years ago now! The prince had been the most skilled of turncoats, and news that he had turned to God when
His
kingdom was about to come for him had aroused widespread hilarity. But the Abbé Dupanloup – who had been the butt of some of it – had not doubted a repentance rooted in what the old prince described as ‘moral fatigue and deep disgust’. Politics had left the arch-politician with ashes in his mouth and the abbé had caught the burned-out effluvium. Talleyrand, ex-royalist, ex-revolutionary,
ex-Bonapartist
and ex-bishop, had in the end signed a paper repudiating the world’s excesses and his share therein. This had satisfied the priest in Dupanloup but disturbed the man. Thinking of it now, he found
more detachment in the great worldling than in himself – who was heartbroken to be seen as an enemy here, in a city which he loved. He was suffering too at Mastai’s coldness for, entwined with his
exasperation
, he felt tenderness for the obstinate old pope and had been trying not to hurt him when he warned that to define the doctrine would be ‘inopportune’. But the word was a red rag to the Curia.

The main body of the basilica was surmounted by a cloud. Many in the congregation had arrived soaked and, as the place warmed up, vapour rose, feet steamed like puddings and now, five hours later, it looked as though a locomotive had driven through.

‘Libera
nos,
domine.’

Maximin Giraud was trying to do his Zouave uniform honour by standing as straight as the nobs from the Noble Guard, but was tormented by an itch. Fleas? Bedbugs? Lice? In a crowd like this there must be congregations of all three. He was shocked to hear the Zouave behind him parody the litany. Some chaps in the battalion were none too stable. Maximin, whose own stability had been put in doubt, recognised an alien brand of crackiness.

‘Good Lord deliver us …’

A priest looked around. Maximin knew he was French by his neckband. He had thought of being a priest himself once.

‘… from Bishop Félix Dupanloup …’

That Zouave was looking for trouble. The priest looked at Maximin who didn’t move a muscle. His confessors had told him that he owed it to God and man to get respect. This, he argued, was a burden with which he needed help. ‘But,’ the last one had said, ‘you’re not easily helped, Maximin!’ He’d got him into the Zouaves, though, and maybe something would come of that? There were bigwigs here today. One might take him up.

‘Our Lady,’ the last confessor had said, ‘didn’t show herself to you for your own sake. You bring hope to millions.’ Humanity’s worst fear, said the priest, was that God had forgotten it and so any divine message was a consolation, even a stern one. Maybe indeed stern ones were best? Prophesying plagues and penalties, Maximin and Mélanie had explained the potato blight, the failed walnut and cereal crops, and the famine. People were consoled by that. They preferred punishment to random bad luck.

The word stuck in Maximin’s head. Had he, while delivering other
people from randomness, got stuck in it himself? ‘If I’ve to get respect,’ he’d argued, ‘wouldn’t it be safer if …’

‘Not money, Maximin.’ The confessor was curt. ‘You’re getting no more out of me. It doesn’t help you. I’m sorry.’

Maximin’s hopes had been raised, then cruelly dashed. On his way here from France, he’d met someone who’d had the same experience. A former boy-soprano, the chap had had a taste of fame until he lost his voice and couldn’t, he explained, take to anything else. Not after the professional satisfaction he’d known.