The Judas Cloth (78 page)

Repeated messages from Prospero reminded Nicola that his own submission was waited on.

In December Rome was flooded. The waters, as though rebaptizing the city, immersed it to the depths of three, then four metres, and gave King Victor Emmanuel a pretext for a first flying visit to comfort his new subjects and show his excommunicated face. Gossip claimed that he had tried to abdicate from very shame and that his ministers had had to stiffen him. To thwart them, Cardinal Antonelli, now a full-time
agent
provoca
teur
, protested at the royal visit, as he had at the occupation of the Quirinal Palace and other iniquities. Formal protests dispatched to nuncios all over Europe were a way of affirming the Pope’s surviving sovereignty.

Meanwhile, taking their cue from the Curia, some of the great Roman families sealed up their front doors as a snub to the new regime. But they were not greatly missed, as new arrivals from Turin and Florence were disembarking from every train.
Piazze
, lately as dreamy as cloisters, bustled, and the wild flowers which had adorned their cobblestones died beneath the heels of new citizens, while old ones complained angrily of the noise.

News kept reaching Nicola of Minority bishops who were still staunch and of those who had recanted. In the privacy of episcopal palaces
throughout Europe, struggles were painfully coming to a head. Stiffened by their country’s victory, the Germans were resisting best.

By early February the last French bishops to hold out were Darboy and Dupanloup. Then, on the 18th, Dupanloup wrote his letter of consent, and on 2nd March, one month after the capitulation of Paris to the Prussians, its archbishop surrendered to the Pope. Some weeks later, a letter came from one of the priests who had been with Darboy in Rome. Its gist was that Monseigneur wanted Monsignor Santi to know his motives for recanting.

The Archbishop of Paris had not, said the priest, abandoned his principles. He did, however, feel obliged to postpone the struggle for them. As Monsignor Santi must surely guess, the decision had been taken after much agony of conscience. What he might not so easily imagine was the devastation here. This was no time for controversy. Events in France and Italy had inflicted wounds which it would be wicked to exacerbate. Unity was now the prime concern and Darboy believed that Catholics must be seen to work for it if they did not want religion to become hateful to their compatriots. Accordingly, despite his own links to the fallen Empire, he had ordered a hymn begging God’s blessing on the new French Republic to be sung in all his churches and, in a similar spirit, made his submission to the Pope. Monsignor Santi must not despair. The justice he craved could be sought in happier times. For now, Monseigneur begged him to believe in his paternal love and in his loyalty to the memory of the late Cardinal Amandi. A postscript, written in the priest’s own name, noted that Monseigneur’s embrace of the new republic had angered many. Monarchists were especially enraged. ‘The pursuit of peace,’ concluded the letter, ‘is a
via
dolorosa
.’

There was no mention of Giraud’s retraction. Nicola, who had been unable to request it while Darboy was besieged in Paris, decided to do so now. This, however, was delicate in the light of its controversial nature and Darboy’s mood. He was pondering how best to couch his request when he received the following letter:

Nicola took this to Prospero. ‘Your heart,’ he hoped, ‘will tell you what to do. If it does not, let me implore you to help. Unlike you, I have no influence here. Besides, I am going to France.’

Prospero was horrified. France? Was Nicola insane? What about loyalty at this time of trial? During the Pope’s Calvary …

‘Ah,’ said Nicola, ‘you choose to see him as Christ. But what if one saw him as Caiaphas?’

‘Stop!’ Prospero, picking up a poker, began to bang it against his coal scuttle.

‘The Roman mode of refutation!’ roared Nicola, trying to be heard above the din.

‘What?’ Prospero had deafened himself.

‘You’ve just demonstrated it.’ He stood up. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘No! Listen! Unless and until you give in your letter of consent, I shall not help Darboy, who is reaping what he sowed. He consorted with Liberals and is now in the hands of the Reds.’

‘Are you offering me a bargain? Good! Write the letter and I’ll sign it. But you must promise not to submit it until Pius has made an appeal on Darboy’s behalf or Darboy has been released.’

‘Agreed.’ Prospero sat down, penned a few lines, dried them, and handed the paper to Nicola who read: ‘
Ego
profiteor
pure
et
sempliciter
toto
corde
et
anima
adhaerere
definitionis
dogmaticis
a
Sanctitate
tua
prolatis
die
18 juli
habita
.’ He signed.

‘Goodbye, then,’ said Prospero. ‘I hope I am in your prayers as often as you are in mine. As for the paper which I suspect you of hoping to recover from Darboy, it has no doubt been burned. The nuncio wrote that Darboy prudently burned a lot of papers connected with the Council during the Prussian siege of Paris.’

Nicola told him that he was thinking more of Darboy than of the paper. The living took precedence over the dead.

A week later he was in the drawing room of his friend the Abbé Delisle. The room, fragrant with the Sicilian blood oranges which he had brought as a gift, hummed like an apiary and showed signs that the unwary risked being stung.

A young woman cried, ‘It’s despicable!’

She was his host’s sister or perhaps cousin. Nicola had not got this clear, for sisters, aunts, nieces and even a sprinkling of pious uncles had come in throngs to hear his news of Rome.

‘I couldn’t keep them away!’ The abbé clasped his friend’s hands and smiled in rueful amusement, for the guests, already oblivious of Rome, were embroiled in tussles of their own. ‘Just as well,’ he whispered, ‘they’re not of our way of thinking at all!’

All the guests had the same high colouring as their host, with bright blue eyes, hair like dimmed brass, and the forthright manner which had drawn Nicola to him when they met last year in Rome.

‘There are Judases among the clergy!’ cried the young woman.

‘There may be an explanation!’

‘There is: he’s saving his neck!’ She arched her own superbly
slim-stemmed
one, as though defying the guillotine. Her coiled hair flamed and Nicola thought of the Maid of Orléans. There was a combustive spark in her and Orléans was where they were, in the diocese of Monseigneur Dupanloup who, though a Liberal Catholic, was politically a royalist.

Getting here had been slow. The railways were disrupted by the recent war and progress through a wrecked but buoyant landscape – spring greenery was pushing through twisted girders – had made the traveller feel like a man doing the Stations of the Cross. All along the way he had seen maimed men and convoys of returning prisoners, gutted buildings and neglected fields. Yet the war’s last act might be still to
come and its victim could, said the abbé’s guests, be Monseigneur Darboy whose Vicar-General, the Abbé Lagarde, had let him down and abandoned him in prison, apparently – but could this be true? – to save his own skin. Lagarde, a priest and the son of a baron, was a man whose word should have been his bond – and yet …

The Vicar-General, Delisle explained, had been released from the Paris prison, where he had been held with the archbishop, so that he might go to Versailles to negotiate an exchange of hostages with the Government. On leaving, he had promised to return at once, but two weeks had now passed without a word from him.

‘And the rabble are making capital out of it! Listen.’ The young woman took a newspaper from her reticule. ‘This is one of their papers,
The
Cry
of
the
People
.’ She read: “a It is our duty to put on record the fact that the French clergy in the persons of Monseigneur Darboy and his Vicar-General has betrayed an oath sworn on the archbishop’s head. Let Paris judge on which side lie moderation, honour and justice and which must take responsibility for the outcome.”’ She dropped the declamatory tone in which she had been reading. ‘He’s let us all down.’

Watching a blush creep up her face, Nicola guessed that she was embarrassed at having lent her histrionic talents to the Commune’s rhetoric. Poor Maid of Orléans, he thought. Her voices are garbled.

She had, however, found a more congenial topic. It seemed that a woman she knew had been slipping in and out of Paris, carrying letters from loyal priests to the Vicar-General in Versailles, pleading with him to keep his word and return.

Her listeners marvelled. A woman courier! How did she manage? The Paris stations were guarded and there was no longer a direct service to Versailles. And wasn’t the Commune shooting anyone suspected of having contacts with that town?

‘I naturally can’t tell you how she does it – only that last time she saw the abbé, she flung herself at his feet, held up her crucifix and conjured him to return to his archbishop.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Mumbled lamely about things he could not disclose.’

‘How shameful – and how splendid of her!’

‘Yes,’ agreed the Maid of Orléans and gave Nicola her Communard paper as a memento of the trials of France. He wondered could the woman courier be herself?

When the guests had gone, he and Delisle talked more easily.

‘Might they really shoot Monseigneur Darboy?’

‘Yes,’ said the abbé. ‘Their hatred is visceral. They hate the Army because it lost the war and the Church because it abetted the Empire’s twenty years of oppression – which it did. I was on eggs just now because to say so can start a war in one’s own drawing room. People like my cousin, you see, think the Church was right.’

‘The Maid of Orléans?’

‘A good name for her. Only she would burn others rather than herself and now those others have Darboy in their hands. Forgive me if I tell you something distasteful, but Paris is not Rome and you should know how battles there are fought. What started the present turmoil was a squabble over cannons which the mob did not want turned over to the Prussians, despite the armistice. Well, it seized them and the French troops sent to get them disobeyed their general’s order to fire. Chaos broke out. Two generals were shot and their heads beaten to a pulp, whereupon two women stepped from the crowd, squatted over their bodies, and urinated on them. I heard this from an eyewitness – an officer who was lucky to get away alive. That’s to tell you the sort of rage which has been unstoppered. It is old and sour and goes back to the Revolution of eighty-nine and the revenge taken later on the
revolutionaries
. Its targets are ourselves and the Army:
couvent
et
caserne
. The Reds are ritualists. Why do you think they arrested Monseigneur?’

‘To treat him as they did the generals? Then why offer to exchange him for this man What’s-his-name?’

‘Blanqui. Auguste Blanqui. Because that too would be a ritual, an exchange of the first priest of Paris for the man whose newspaper bore the slogan “War to the supernatural”. Rigault, the Procureur, says he would happily strangle the last priest with the guts of the last king. It is as well to know these things.’

Nicola asked whether Delisle knew of
conservative
hatred for Darboy.

‘Well,’ said the abbé, ‘Monseigneur is the devout, honourable, and ambitious son of a village grocer: a vexing mixture for the better born who have been obliged to play second fiddle to him. They too might relish his downfall.’

‘But he’s in the hands of the Left!’

‘And it would be so easy to leave him there! There need be no plot. A climate of opinion is created and the thing goes from there. How?’ Delisle shrugged. ‘By reminding the faithful that he is in bad odour with the Pope and that, now that the Empire is gone, we need a less imperial archbishop. By chatter from people like the blind, blue-blooded
Monseigneur
de Ségur who has been spreading a story about the Emperor’s
having had a plan to found a schismatic French Church with Darboy at its head. It’s slander, but mud sticks because Ségur was known to be Mastai’s spy and the uncharitable say mat Darboy slapped him when his tittletattle to Pius got back to him. According to some reports, the spy then slid to his knees and turned the other cheek! Don’t laugh, Monsignore. This is all deadly serious, because those who peddle such tales do so as part of a scheme to bring back the Bourbons so that they, in turn, may restore the Temporal Power. Wheels within wheels! All things work together for the greater glory of the Comte de Chambord, known to Legitimists as Henri V. The connection escapes you? Wait. You should know that royalist bishops are circulating petitions to our new National Assembly, begging it to intervene on behalf of the Pope. Intervene how? With our ruined armies? While the Prussians are still in France? They know it can’t be done but deceive their flocks so as to drum up support for Chambord who says that
he
, if restored, would do it. This manoeuvre is known as the Union of the Throne and the Altar! Does it not strike you that its supporters might prefer a new archbishop? Of course they would! Darboy always irked them, but he became intolerable the day he rallied to our new Republic and had hymns sung for it in the churches of his diocese. It was the patriotic thing to do since we were at war, but the
Domine
salvam fac
Republican
stuck in monarchist gullets. It is hard though – in the ordinary way – to replace an archbishop!’