Maurice Druon - The She-Wolf

Another page, and another, which caught in his broken nails. A black line was drawn through a name.

‘Here’s Messer Dante Alighieri, the poet, but only for a small sum, when he came to Paris to visit Queen Clémence after she had become a widow. He was a great friend of hers, as he had been of King Charles of Hungary, Madame Clémence’s father. I remember him sitting in your chair, my lord. A man without a spark of kindness. He was the son of a money-changer; and he talked to me for a whole hour with great contempt of the financier’s trade. But he could afford to be ill-natured and go off and get drunk with women in houses of ill-fame, while talking of his pure love for the Lady Beatrice. He made our language sing as no one before him has ever done. And how he described the Inferno, my lord! You have not read it? Oh, you must have it translated. One trembles to think that it may perhaps be like that. Do you know that in Ravenna, where Messer Dante spent his last years, the people used to scatter from his path in fear because they thought he really had gone down into Hell? And, even now, many people refuse to believe that he died two years ago, for they say he was a magician and could not die. He certainly didn’t like banking, nor indeed Monseigneur of Valois who exiled him from Florence.’

The whole time he was talking of Dante, Tolomei was putting out his two fingers again and touching the wood of his chair.

‘There, that’s where you’ll be, my lord,’ he went on, making a mark in his big book; ‘immediately after Monseigneur de Marigny; but be reassured, not the one who was hanged and whom Monseigneur of Artois mentioned a little while ago. No, his brother, the Bishop of Beauvais. From today you have a credit with me of ten thousand livres. You can draw on it at your convenience, and look on my modest house as your own. Cloth, arms, jewels, you will find every kind of goods you may require at my counters and can charge them against this credit.’

He was carrying on his trade by habit; lending people the wherewithal to buy what he sold.

‘And what about your lawsuit against your aunt, Monseigneur? Are you thinking of taking it up again, now that you’re so powerful?’ he asked Robert of Artois.

‘I most certainly shall, but at the right time,’ the giant replied, getting to his feet. ‘There’s no hurry, and I’ve learnt that too much haste is a bad thing. I’m letting my dear aunt grow older; I’m leaving her to exhaust herself in small lawsuits against her vassals, make new enemies every day by her chicanery, and put her castles, which I treated a bit roughly on my last visit to her lands – which are really mine – into order again. She’s beginning to realize what it costs her to hold on to my property. She had to lend Monseigneur of Valois fifty thousand livres which she’ll never see again, for they went to make up my wife’s dowry, and incidentally enabled me to pay you off. So, you see, she’s not quite so noxious a woman as people say, the bitch! I merely take care not to see too much of her, she’s so fond of me she might spoil me with one of those sweet dishes from which so many people in her entourage have died. But I shall have my county, banker, I shall have it, you can be sure of that. And on that day, as I’ve promised you, you shall become my treasurer.’

Messer Tolomei showed his visitors out, walking down the stairs behind them with some prudence, and accompanied them to the door that gave on to the Rue des Lombards. When Roger Mortimer asked him what interest he was charging on the money he was lending him, the banker waved the question aside.

‘Merely do me the pleasure,’ he said, ‘of coming up to see me when you have business with the bank. I am sure there is much in which you can instruct me, my lord.’

A smile accompanied the words, and the left eyelid rose a little to reveal a brief glance that implied: ‘We’ll talk alone, not in front of blabbers.’

The cold November wind blowing in from the street made the old man shiver a little. Then, as soon as the door was closed, Tolomei went behind his counters into a little waiting-room where he found Boccaccio, the travelling representative of the Bardi Company.

‘Friend Boccaccio,’ he said, ‘today and tomorrow buy all the English, Dutch and Spanish currency you can, all the Italian florins, doubloons, ducats, and foreign money you can find; offer a denier, even two deniers, above the present rate of exchange. Within three days they’ll have increased in value by a quarter. Every traveller will have to come to us for foreign currency, since they’ll be forbidden to export French gold. I’ll go halves with you on the profits.’ 12

Having a pretty good idea of how much foreign gold was available and adding it to what he already had in his coffers, Tolomei calculated that the operation would make him a profit of from fifteen to twenty thousand livres. He had just lent ten thousand and would therefore make about double his loan. With the profits he could make further loans. Mere routine.

When Boccaccio congratulated him on his ability and, turning the compliment in his thin-lipped, bourgeois, Florentine way, said that it was not in vain that the Lombard companies in Paris had chosen Messer Spinello Tolomei for their Captain-General, the old man replied: ‘Oh, after fifty years in the business, I no longer deserve any credit for it; it’s simply second nature. If I were really clever, do you know what I would have done? I’d have bought up your reserves of florins and kept all the profit for myself. But when you come to think of it, what use would it be to me? You’ll learn, Boccaccio, you’re still very young …’

Boccaccio had sons who were already grey at the temples.

‘You reach an age when you have a feeling of working to no purpose if you’re merely working for yourself. I miss my nephew. And yet his difficulties are more or less resolved; I’m sure that he’d be running no risk if he came back now. But that young devil of a Guccio refuses to come; he’s being stubborn, from pride I think. And, in the evening, when the clerks have left and the servants gone to bed, this big house seems very empty. I sometimes regret Siena.’

‘Your nephew ought to have done what I did, Spinello,’ said Boccaccio, ‘when I found myself in a similar difficulty with a woman of Paris. I removed my son and took him to Italy.’

Messer Tolomei shook his head and thought how melancholy a house was without children. Guccio’s son must be seven by now; and Tolomei had never seen him. The mother refused to allow it.

The banker rubbed his right leg which felt heavy and cold; he had pins and needles in it. Over the years, death began to catch up with you, little by little, taking you by the feet. Presently, before going to bed, he would send for a basin of hot water and put his leg in it.

‘MONSEIGNEUR OF MORTIMER, I shall have great need of brave and gallant knights such as you for my crusade,’ declared Charles of Valois. ‘You will think me very vain to say my crusade when in truth it is Our Lord’s, but I must confess, and everyone will recognize the fact, that if this vast enterprise, the greatest and most glorious to which the Christian nations can be summoned, takes place, it will be because I shall have organized it with my own hands. And so, Monseigneur of Mortimer, I ask you straight out, and with that frankness you will learn to recognize as natural to me: will you join me?’

Roger Mortimer sat up straight in his chair; he frowned a little and lowered his lids over his flint-coloured eyes. Was he being merely offered the command of a banner of twenty knights, like some little country noble or some soldier of fortune stranded here by the mischances of fate? The proposal was mere charity.