Le Roi de fer by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Witnessing the End of Chivalry “The king was still against the balustrade. He looked at the black hand of the grandmaster planted in the red cinders. A burnt hand; all that remained of the illustrious order of the knights of the Temple. But this hand was immobilized in the gesture of anathema.” Starting in 1314, Maurice Druon’s Le Roi de Fer (The Iron King) (1955) works three interrelated plots together: the cruel end of the Templars and the unfolding of their grandmaster’s curse; the efforts of King Philip the Fair’s unhappily married daughter Isabelle, Queen of England, and her larger than life cousin Robert Artois, to nail the wives of Philip’s three sons for adultery; and the French countryside love story of a young Lombard (Italian) money lender in training (who at one point travels to London with Bocaccio’s father). As in the best historical fiction, Druon makes his story come alive by convincingly setting the historical stage of his novel through vivid details of daily life in the past, here in the early fourteenth century, including its superstitions, passions, pleasures, machinations, and brutality, focusing on the aristocracy but not neglecting the commoners. It's a compelling book because everyone is so human, while the situations they’re in are often so terrible: interrogating or being interrogated via torture, attending or suffering gruesome public executions, learning that their sons are cuckolds or daughters adulterers, gloating over the downfall of a nemesis, using blackmail to stop a persecution or poison to kill an enemy, and so on. King Philip is ruthless, unforgiving, and cold, like a statue, an Iron King (“In the terrible function of justice he filled, Philip the Fair seemed absent from the world, or rather he seemed to communicate with a universe vaster than the visible world”); he regrets that his people complain about taxes and don’t appreciate what he gives them; he’s only comfortable with animals like his hunting dogs; he hasn’t stopped missing his deceased wife, the only woman he ever loved. Queen Isabelle is pious, cold, and cruel like her father Philip, but also misses loving and being loved, because her husband King Edward spends his love on dirty rascals from the streets around the port of London. Druon perks up his narrative by dropping occasional foreshadowing bombs, like this: “People called on to play a decisive role in the history of nations are most often ignorant of the collective destinies incarnated in them. The two personages who came to have this long interview, on an afternoon in March 1314, in the palace of Westminster, couldn’t imagine that they would, by the linking of their acts, be the first artisans of a war between France and England which would last more than a hundred years.” Or this: “But destinies slowly form, and no one knows, among all our acts sewn at random, which sprout and flourish, like trees. No one could imagine that the kiss exchanged on the border of the Mauldre would conduct the beautiful Marie to the cradle of a king.” He writes many cool lines on human nature and life: “The suffering of others, the blood of others, the insults of his victims, their hate or their despair, didn’t touch him. This insensibility was a natural disposition aiding him to serve the superior interests of the kingdom. He had the vocation of public good as others had the vocation of love … There is in history a singular line, always renewed, of fanatics of order. Destined for an abstract and absolute ideal, for them human lives have no value if they threaten the dogma of institutions; and one could say that they have forgotten that the collectivity they serve is composed of men.” He describes characters memorably: “This curious slowness that she had in her voice, gestures, and even in her manner of moving and looking at something. She gave the impression of undulating softness and abnormal placidity; but irony shone in her eyes between her long black eyelashes. The misfortune of others, their struggles and their dramas, surely delighted her.” He can even write lyrical romance scenes: “And they stayed like that [kissing] for long seconds, among the peeping of birds, the far off barking of dogs, and all the great respiration of nature that seemed to lift the earth under their feet.” He also includes some helpful notes to explain historical concepts or events or laws, etc. I found the French of the 20th-century book harder to read for some reason than that of the 19th-century Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, looking up and not finding more words in my Kindle dictionary in Druon’s book than I did in Dumas’. Moreover, it is true that there are few “good” characters in Druon’s novel; there are flawed ones or out and out vile ones, like Nogaret. But I was completely caught by The Iron King and look forward to reading the next six books in his Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings) series. View all my reviews
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