Les Poisons de la couronne by Maurice Druon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Long and Glorious Reign of Louis X the Quarrelsome? Les Poisons de la couronne [the poisons of the crown] (1956), the third novel in Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits [the cursed kings] series, starts in 1315 shortly after the second one ended. The death of the Iron King Philippe le bel (the Fair) thrust his son Louis X onto the throne facing many challenges: the French barons are reasserting their independence, the Flemish are getting uppity, the Conclave still can’t choose a new Pope, the family feud between Mahaut (aunt) and Robert (nephew) d’Artois is boiling over, the people are starving, the country is rain-soaked, and the treasury is dry. Good luck, France! Clueless Louis ended the previous novel imagining that marrying Clemence of Hungary would lead to a long and glorious reign, but on route from Naples to France the Queen-to-be is beset by ill omens, including an apocalyptic storm at sea and a serious injury to her “friend” and escort Guccio Baglioni on the dock. What will happen if Clemence—a deeply religious and empathic person—discovers that her new husband had his first wife strangled in prison? Like the first two novels, this one is peopled by vivid, compelling, flawed characters who, if not always likeable, are always interesting to observe. Louis le Hutin (the Quarrelsome) is a bad king: sickly, hysterical, fickle, malleable, callous, incompetent. His Mud Campaign against the Flemish is an absurd debacle. Will marriage to Clemence turn him into a good person and a holy king? Well, as the narrator puts it, “It is generally wrong to divert people from their nature. Better to leave a villain to his villainy than to turn him into a sheep; kindness not being his business, he will use it deplorably.” Soon, the “new” Louis is granting amnesty to criminals, leading to a surge in crime. Yet Druon makes even Louis sympathetic: “Am I then damned, am I then cursed, for not being able to be loved by whomever I love?” Louis’ younger brother Philippe is kinglier than the King. He forgives his wife Jeanne for aiding and abetting adultery and handles the feuding d’Artois nobles with gravitas and skill. His martial camp in the muddy mess of Flanders is clean and organized, and he passes the time there by having a knight entertain the men with recitations from Dante’s new poem The Divine Comedy, especially verses castigating his own royal family (in addition to interesting footnotes about the Hospitallers, Templars, and unicorns, Druon provides one about Dante’s hatred of the Capetians). If only Philippe had been born first! Charles Valois, Louis’ uncle, is awful: vain, greedy, and ambitious, he manipulates Louis while hoping something will happen to the King so he can become Regent. Mahaut d’Artois is a larger than life widow-countess-peer who wishes she could go to battle in armor and is dauntless in her scorched-earth feud with her nephew Robert for control of the d’Artois lands, castles, and incomes. When cornered, she can be devious and ruthless with potions and poisons. What’s goes for Mahaut goes for Robert d’Artois, minus the potions and poisons. Aunt and nephew are so alike that they gigantically hate each other: “This hatred which excluded any agreement, any transaction, exceeded its object, and one could wonder if there was not between the giantess and the giant a kind of passion in reverse, unknown to themselves, and which would have been better appeased in incest than in war.” I don’t know if Guccio, the young Lombard, is a real historical figure, but he’s neat: friends with Boccaccio’s father and full of youthful passion, enthusiasm, and recklessness. He performs dashing deeds and fabricates exaggerated accounts of his exploits and quickly believes them. What the proud, impoverished aristocratic brothers of Guccio’s beloved Marie would do to him if they found out that he, a money lender-usurer, is planning to marry their sister, I tremble to think. Tolomei Spinelli, Captain General of the Lombards in France, is wise, spicy, and crafty, advising his nephew Guccio about his romance with Marie while keeping an eye out for any way to make money and to get more French nobles in his debt. And Eudeline, the linen maid ex-lover of Louis, has come to hate the King but to love Clemence. “All her emotional forces were turned towards the queen, her friend. And if Eudeline was suffering at this moment, it was from Clémence's suffering.” She shows that there are some good people in this history and the world. As in the first two books, Druon is ever a fine writer. Great moments: “But Jeanne could not contain herself. Look! She had been doing nothing else for eight days since she was released. Like a starving person gorging herself on food without believing that she will ever be able to be satisfied, she regained possession of the universe through her gaze. The leaves on the trees, the light clouds, a steeple looming in the distance, the flight of a bird, the grass on the banks, everything seemed to her to be exhilaratingly splendid.” Vivid historical descriptions: “Hospitaller brothers, in long brown robes, passed ceaselessly between the bays of beds, sometimes to go and sing the services, sometimes to give care or distribute meals. The exercises of worship were intimately mingled with therapy; the rattles of pain answered the verses of the psalms; the scent of incense could not dominate the atrocious smell of fever and gangrene; death was offered as a public spectacle. Inscriptions, running around the walls in tall ornate letters, invited to prepare for death rather than healing.” Witty lines: “I believe in the virtue of poisons to get rid of an enemy, but hardly in potions to win an adversary.” Pithy wisdom: “Of all human functions, that which consists in governing one's fellows, although the most envied, is the most disappointing, for it never has an end, and allows the mind no rest.” Foreshadowing bombs: Behind Louis X rode his brothers Philippe and Charles, as well as his cousin Philippe de Valois. Before fourteen years, the crown would have rested on their three heads.” Druon writes the complexity of the human mind, as when Clemence’s grandmother watches the ship carrying her beloved granddaughter away to France and Louis: “The large ship … represented at the same time … the triumph of her policy and the melancholy of things completed.” And his history shows how past actions influence the present and future, cursed gifts that keep on giving, as in his reminders of what the Iron King did to the Templars. The overall movement of the series is the decline of France as a world power in the early 14th century, because of their rulers’ cruelty, stupidity, selfishness and superstition. On to the fourth novel! View all my reviews
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