La Louve de France by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The body of France was sick Yikes! Maurice Druon sure doesn’t coddle his reader. At the end of the fourth novel of his Les Rois Maudits (The Cursed Kings) series about the early 14th century decline of superpower France, the time of “punishment” is coming, partly because Prince Philippe (son of Philippe Le Bel) has benefited from two regicides to become King of France. The prologue to the fifth book in the series, La Louve de France (1959), then skips forward five years to announce that Philippe is dead! Despite Philippe being good king material and having a solid enough position vis-à-vis his barons and the Pope, his reign ran into a buzz saw of adversity, ranging from famine to a Templar-inspired pillaging of towns and churches by huge bands of roving youths. In short, after being the main, mostly appealing player in the fourth novel, Philippe is forgotten in the fifth, for which Druon shifts his focus to thirty-three-year-old Queen Isabelle of England, nicknamed by her foes the She-Wolf of France (la Louve de France) because she’s the feisty daughter of Philip Le Bel. In the first novel, Isabelle was already estranged from her husband, Edward II, who preferred spending his time and love on men, and by the time of the fifth book, things have gotten so bad that Isabelle is being kept under a rotating house arrest, spied on and isolated and stolen from by the King’s favorite Hugh Despenser and his people. She fears for her life. This fifth novel introduces new historical figure-characters, like the feckless and irrational Edward II, doomed to become kingly only after it’s too late, and Roger Mortimer, Edward’s ambitious and implacable foe and Isabelle’s would be lover, who begins as a political prisoner in the Tower of London (much of this book takes place in England), while reacquainting us with various remarkable characters from past novels: --Robert d’Artois the giant nephew and Mahaut d’Artois the giantess aunt, STILL locked in their bitter long-running family feud and still formidable political players; --Charles Valois, younger brother of Philippe le Bel, ambitious and reckless, would be Holy Roman Emperor and de facto ruler of France through his weak nephew King Charles IV; --Spinello Tolomei the wizened Lombard banker, who for many years has funded most of the disastrous wars waged by France; --his nephew Guccio Baglioni, still resentful that Marie Cressay rejected him and still ignorant that she had to in order to raise the heir to the throne of France as if he were their son; --Hugues de Bouville, rotund, soft, sensitive, and in need of a good Confession about sacrificing the baby of Guccio and Marie to save the heir to the throne and hiding his identity; --and Pope John XXII (Jacques Dueze), no fool, wise to Valois’ extortionary practices and curious about Guccio and Marie. Druon often changes our perceptions of such characters. We begin this novel loathing Edward and Hugh and sympathizing with Isabelle (for the first time) and Mortimer and Robert and end by sympathizing with Edward and Hugh and loathing Mortimer and (to a lesser extent) Isabelle. Druon doesn’t achieve this simply by making characters suffer (though that helps), but by writing their points of view and ennobling them via suffering. Even the self-serving Valois, who, after diverting a Crusade to free Armenians from Turkish oppression in the holy land to a French invasion of a French populace in Aquitaine, just the latest instance of his life-long ambitious scheming, is forced to confront his mortality earlier than he’d imagined and more movingly than we’d expected. Soon Valois is talking with, praying for, and loving Enguerrand de Marigny, whom in an earlier novel he had executed on false charges: “Each man who dies is the poorest man in the universe.” The overall effect is to show that people, even famous historical figures, are people. “The saintly are never as saintly, nor the cruel ever as completely cruel as others believe.” Druon’s eye for irony is ever keen, as when Guccio takes “his” son to see Clemence, widow of the poisoned King Louis Hutin, and the woman has a pang of envy at seeing “Guccio’s” healthy boy, while neither she nor Guccio have any idea that the child is Clemence’s and the rightful King of France. Or in a line like this: “One went from war to tournament and from tournament to war. Ah! What pleasures and noble adventures!” Nothing alienates us from medieval France and England so much as the horrific public humiliations, tortures, and executions they performed on criminals: “And all these knights who had sworn by Saint George to defend ladies, maids, the oppressed and orphans, rejoiced, with much laughter and joyful remarks, at the spectacle offered to them by this corpse of an old man cut in two halves.” Though their disposal of the parts of an important deceased man is also exotic: “The entrails, as Valois had disposed of them, were transported to the abbey of Chaâlis, and the heart, enclosed in an urn, given to his third wife to await the moment when she herself would have a burial.” Druon, as ever, however, makes many dry, incisive insights into human nature that resonate with us today, like “Nothing is more repugnant to a woman than the sweat of a man she's stopped loving,” and “But the proud easily have a pure conscience.” And he writes wonderfully vivid, historically transporting descriptions: “La Réole, built on a rocky spur and dominated by a circle of green hills, overlooked the Garonne. Cut out against the pale sky, enclosed within its ramparts of good ocher stone gilded by the setting sun, displaying its bell towers, the towers of its castle, the high framework of its town hall with its openwork bell tower, and all its roofs of red tiles pressed one against the other, it resembled the miniatures which represented Jerusalem in the Books of Hours. A pretty town, truly.” One thing to keep in mind when reading Les Rois Maudits is that Druon may sometimes present rumors as facts. For instance, in the third book Mahaut poisons King Louis Hutin and his baby son, when Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) says Louis probably died of illness and doesn’t say anything about how his son died. Similarly, in this fifth novel a red-hot poker fatally shoved up a royal anus is now seen as propaganda by historians. So Druon is writing historical FICTION, not history. That said, his novels make psychological sense and are absorbing and powerful. View all my reviews
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