a good king with all one’s heart; he leads you to do your duty, and the pains one takes don’t matter because one feels that they contribute to the greater good. What is difficult, however, is to serve a bad monarch well … or a poor pope. I saw how happy they were, those men at the time of my distant youth who served Philip the Fair. Being loyal to the vainglorious Valois requires far more effort. They are only prepared to heed advice or listen to reason when defeated and trounced.
It was not until after Crécy that Philip VI accepted a truce based on the proposals I had drawn up. Not so bad after all, or so it would seem, as the truce lasted roughly, despite a few local skirmishes, from 1347 to 1354. Seven years of peace. For many, potentially, a time of contentment. But there you are; in our accursed century, no sooner war is over than the plague takes hold.
You were spared in Périgord. Admittedly, my nephew, admittedly, you paid your tribute to the scourge; yes, indeed you have had your share of honour. But it is nothing beside the deaths that occurred in the numerous towns surrounded by populous countryside, like Florence, Avignon or Paris. Did you know that the disease came from China, via India, Tartary and Asia Minor? It spread, or so they say, as far as Arabia. It is indeed an illness for the unbeliever, sent to us to punish Europe for too many sins. From Constantinople and the shores of the Levant, ships transported the plague to the Greek archipelago, whence it gained the ports of Italy; it crossed the Alps and came to wreak havoc upon us, ahead of countries northward, moving on to England, Holland, Denmark and finishing up in the far north, Norway, Iceland. Have you had both forms of the plague here, the one that kills in three days, with burning fever and coughing up of blood … the unfortunate ones afflicted said they were already enduring the wrath of hell, and the other, with its more drawn-out agony, five or six days, with the same fever and great carbuncles and pustules appearing in the groin and armpits?
Seven long months we suffered this in Avignon. Retiring every evening we wondered if we would see the light of day. Every morning we would explore our underarms and crotches. To feel the faintest heat in those places was terrifying; people would be seized with dread and stare at you with mad eyes. With each breath we said to ourselves perhaps it will be with this mouthful of air that evil will enter. We never left the presence of a friend without thinking ‘will it be him, will it be me, or will it be both of us?’ Weavers were dying in their workshops, falling to the ground beneath their stilled looms, silversmiths dead beside their crucibles gone cold, moneychangers rotting under their counters. Children were dying on their dead mother’s pallet. And the smell, Archambaud, the stench in Avignon! The streets were lined with corpses.
Half, you hear me well, half the population perished. Between January and April of the year 1348 we counted sixty-two thousand dead. The cemetery that the pope bought in haste was full within just one month; we buried eleven thousand bodies there. People departed this life without servants, and were committed to the grave without priests. The son no longer dared visit his father, nor the father his son. Seven thousand houses closed up! All those who could, fled to their properties in the country.
Clement VI stayed in town along with several cardinals including myself. ‘If God wants us, He will take us.’ And although he compelled most of the four hundred officers of the papal household to stay on, they were scarcely enough to organize relief operations. The pope handed out wages to all the doctors and physicians; he hired carters and gravediggers, had supplies distributed and prescribed sound enforcement measures to limit contagion. Nobody at that time accused him of recklessly squandering resources. He reprimanded monks and nuns alike who shirked their charitable duties towards the sick and the dying. Ah! I heard a few things during confession: the repentance of the high and mighty, even those of the Church, who came to cleanse their souls of all their sins and seek absolution! Even the big Florentine and Lombard bankers, who confessed through chattering teeth and suddenly discovered their generous selves. And the cardinals’ mistresses … oh yes, oh yes, my nephew, not all, but a fair few cardinals … these beautiful ladies came to hang their jewels on the Holy Virgin’s statue! They held handkerchiefs under their noses, impregnated with aromatic essences, and threw away their shoes before entering their homes once more. Those who accused Avignon of impiety, of being the new Babylon, didn’t see it during the Great Plague. We were pious all right, I assure you!
What a strange creature is man! When everything goes his way, when he is blooming with health, when his business is flourishing, his wife fertile and his province in peace, isn’t it precisely then that he should constantly lift up his soul unto the Lord and give thanks for such blessings? Not at all; he is quick to forget his creator, proudly flying in the face of all the commandments. However, as soon as misfortune and disaster strike, then he rushes to God. And he prays, and admits his guilt, and he promises to mend his ways. God must be right to burden him, since it is the only way, or so it seems, to bring man back to Him.
I didn’t choose my condition. It was my mother, perhaps you know, who designated me when I was a child. If I accepted this fate, it was, I believe, because I have always been grateful to God for all He has given me, especially, the gift of life. I remember, when I was very young, in our ancient castle in Rolphie, Périgueux, where you yourself were born, Archambaud, but which is no longer home to you since your father chose to take up residence in Montignac fifteen years back … well there in that huge castle, set amongst the ancient stones of a Roman arena, I remember the wonder that filled me suddenly, the wonder of being alive at the centre of the big, wide world, to breathe, to see the sky; I remember this feeling came to me on summer evenings, when the light is long and I was put to bed well before nightfall. The bees buzzed in a vine that climbed the wall beneath my room, the shadow slowly filled the oval courtyard with its enormous stones; birds flew across the still-light sky and the first star appeared amidst the rose-tinged clouds. I had a great childish need to say thank you, and my mother made it clear to me that it was to God I should give thanks, the Organizer of all this beauty. And that thought has never left me.
On this very day, all along our route, often I feel a thank you in my heart for this warm weather, for these russet-coloured forests we ride through, for these still-green pastures, for these loyal servants who escort me, for these fine, fattened horses that I see trotting alongside my palanquin. I enjoy watching the faces of men, the movements of the beasts, the shapes of the trees, all this infinite variety that is the infinitely wonderful work of God.
All our doctors who fight over theology in closed classrooms, and cram themselves full of empty words, and shout bitter abuse at each other, and who bore everyone to death inventing words to name otherwise what we already knew before them, all of these people would be better off contemplating nature, thereby healing their minds. I have the theology that I was taught, handed down from the fathers of the Church; and I have no desire to change it …
Did you know that I could have been pope? Yes, my nephew. Many tell me so, as they tell me that I could yet be pope if I outlast Innocent. It will be God’s will. I do not complain about what he has made me. I thank him that he put me where he has put me, and that he has kept me on to be the age I am, an age that few attain: fifty-five years, my dear nephew, that is my age, and in as fine form as you see me. That is also the Lord’s blessing. Those whom I haven’t met for ten years cannot believe their eyes: that I have changed so little in appearance, my cheeks still as rosy, and my beard scarcely whitened.
The idea of being made or not being made pope only bothers me, in truth – I confide this to you as a relative – when it occurs to me that I could act more wisely than the one who wears the papal tiara. And yet I never had that feeling with Clement VI. He fully understood that the pope should be a monarch above all monarchs, God’s right-hand man. On a day when Jean Birel or some other preacher of asceticism accused him of being too extravagant, and too generous to the supplicants, he responded: ‘Nobody should leave the prince’s company dissatisfied.’ And, turning to me, he added between his teeth: ‘My predecessors didn’t know how to be pope.’ And during the Great Plague, as I was saying, he really proved he was the best. I don’t believe, in all honesty, that I could have done as much as he, and I thanked God, once again, that He hadn’t designated me to lead an ailing Christendom through this ordeal.
Not once did Clement abandon his majesty; and indeed he demonstrated that he was the Holy Father, the father of all Christians, and even father to all others, as when peoples almost everywhere, but