La Reine étranglée by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars History with Teeth (Dirty Tricks, Executions, Betrayals, Corruption, and Courtship) Or How to Undo One Royal Marriage and Make Another (as the Cuckolded King of France) La Reine étranglée (1955), the second novel in Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits series, begins in 1314, France. Philippe IV, the Iron King, AKA the Fair, has died, making his gormless, “shifty-eyed, narrow-shouldered, hollow-chested,” 25-year-old son King, Louis X, AKA the Quarrelsome. Humiliated by the scandal of his wife Marguerite’s adultery, Louis wants to remarry ASAP, but he’s still married to the Queen, so he needs her to write a annulling affidavit confessing that she committed adultery while never consummating their marriage, but she refuses, so he needs a sympathetic new Pope elected to free him from the marriage, but the Conclave of Cardinals is at an impasse. What’s a spoiled new king to do? Queen Marguerite is trying to remain sane in her cruel castle dungeon imprisonment with her cousin Blanche (they sure came down hard on adulteresses in that era!). Will she surrender and write the affidavit to annul her marriage and doom her daughter by Louis and herself? Philippe’s top minister (the most powerful man in France for sixteen years) Enguerrand de Marigny is clinging to power by sabotaging Louis’ attempts to annul his marriage and messaging King Edward of England. Honest in his financial dealings, will Marigny’s corrupt, ungrateful, and dough-like younger brother Jean, whom he made Archbishop, become his Achilles heel? Charles, Count of Valois, the Iron King’s megalomaniacal brother, is rabidly trying to destroy de Marigny, his hatred of him stemming from a land dispute and his desire to return the barons to their former independence and wealth (de Marigny spearheaded Philippe IV’s centralization of power in the state, ending the barons’ traditions of waging private war and coining their own money). Will he finally get the better of his archenemy? Spinello Tolomei, the chief Lombard banker, is scheming with Valois against de Marigny, because he’d like to return France to a more chaotic and fragmented state, because then bankers could wield more power via money and weapons. Tolomei’s capable young nephew, Guccio Baglioni, is still in love with Marie Cressay, the daughter of a penurious aristocratic family whose members appreciate his efforts to help them survive in their dilapidated family manor but would never accept him as a suitor for Marie. What hope for the young lovers? Clemence of Hungary is a beautiful if unfeminine French princess living in Naples; after seeing her portrait (painted by a student of Giotto!), Louis is eager for her to become his next Queen, but there’s still the small matter of Marguerite. Will Clemence’s formidable grandmother (who’s birthed umpteen kings and queens) let her marry the King of France? Robert d’Artois, who partly started the whole thing by exposing the adultery of Marguerite and Blanche (in the first book in the series), is trying to make himself useful to Valois and Louis so they’ll owe him. Can he use his larger-than-life masculine charisma to convince the canny Marguerite to write the affidavit? Complicating all of the above are a horrible famine, high prices, corrupt local officials, and a long cold winter. “Sometimes staggering hordes climbed from the fields to the villages in the vain dream of being given bread there; but they ran into other hordes of starving people who came from the city and seemed to be advancing towards the Last Judgment.” Will the common folk survive till spring? With dispassionate empathy, Druon rotates among the points of view of his characters as he tells the epic story of the fall of France from a superpower due to a series of cocky, stupid, venal, or brutal blunders. There are no heroes. And few likeable characters. Louis’ younger brother Philippe has integrity, young Guccio a romantic heart. And we sympathize with Marguerite (who’s too proud but over-punished for her adultery) and de Marigny (who’s been too powerful for too long but is comparatively clean). d’Artois and Valois are scoundrels, but they are capable of humor and frank self-reflection: “No man is absolutely bad.” Well, Louis is vile, lacking any moral or ethical core and getting his jollies from shooting doves released by a squire from a basket at point blank range. Druon relishes irony: palace washer woman Eudaline imagining Louis showering their natural “daughter with gold and titles,” de Marigny feeling he’s “the most powerful character in the kingdom” holding “all destinies in his hands, even that of the King,” Louis imagining his coming “Long reign of glory,” and so on. He enjoys lobbing foreshadowing grenades, like “By this word, he separated himself from the only man capable of governing in his place and directing his reign. France would pay for this change of mood for many years.” And although I don’t like the characters, Druon so excels at conveying character and historical texture and has so few illusions about human nature and is such a concise and incisive writer, that there is much suspense, surprise, and pleasure in the story, as in the following examples: Barbed banter: “Ah! Cousin, did you think me so foolish as to allow myself to be taken in by your coaxing? You have just used it with me as whores usually do with men, irritating their senses the better to submit them to their will. But you forget that in this profession, women are stronger, and you are only an apprentice.” Great line: “‘Never… never have I seen a man in the world crawl with such height.’” Keen insight: “Power-loving men are above all driven by the desire to act on the universe, to make events happen, and to have been right. Wealth, honors, distinctions are in their eyes only tools for their action. Marigny and Valois belonged to that species.” Fascinating historical detail: “Louis saw the heart of his father, placed near the funerary bed in a casket of crystal and golden bronze. Everyone who saw this heart, the arteries cut flush, behind the pane, remained stupefied at its smallness: ‘a child’s heart… or a bird’s,’ murmured the visitors. And it was hard to believe that such a tiny viscus would have animated such a terrible monarch.” Vivid description: “His hair damp and hanging, his eyes vague, his shirt stuck to his thin sides, the Hutin looked like a drowned man who had just come out of the Seine.” Psychological autopsy: “Astonishing character that of this prince, at the same time impatient and tenacious, vehement and twisted, courageous with his body but weak before praise, and always animated by extreme ambitions, always launched in gigantic enterprises and always failing for lack of a correct appreciation of the facts.” Bittersweet triumph: “Man in truth is a strange creature… Do you know that suddenly I feel an emptiness of the soul? I had grown so used to hating this villain that now it seems to me that I will miss him.” Ennobling epiphany (the key to the entire series): “Any unjust act, even committed for a just cause, carries with it its curse.’ And when he discovered this, Enguerrand de Marigny stopped hating anyone and holding others responsible for his fate.” Now I’m (morbidly) on to the next novel in the series! View all my reviews
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