The Royal Succession Read Online Free PDF Page A

altar of God of which Saint John the Divine speaks in his Apocalypse?'
    The noise of horses hooves, a most unusual sound at that hour, echoed along the abbey walls and across the little round cobbles with which the best streets in Lyons were paved. The Cardinal listened for a moment, then relapsed into the reasoning whose consequences were indeed surprising.
    `For if Paradise is empty,' he said to himself, `it creates a singular modification in the condition of those whom we decree to be saints or blessed. And what is true for the souls of the just must necessarily be true also for the souls of the unjust. God could not punish the wicked before He has recompensed the just. The labourer receives his hire at the end of the day; and it must be at the end of the world that the wheat will be separated finally from the tares. There can be no soul at this moment living in Hell, since sentence has not yet been pronounced. And that is
    as much as to say that Hell, till then, does not exist.'
    This proposition was peculiarly reassuring to someone thinking of death; it postponed the date of the supreme trial without destroying the prospect of eternal life, and was more or less in keeping with the intuition, common to the greater part of men, that death is a falling into a dark and immense silence, into an indefinite unconsciousness.
    Clearly such a doctrine, if it were to be openly professed, could not fail to arouse violent attack both among the doctors of the Church and among the pious populace, and the moment was ill - chosen for a candidate to the Holy See to preach the inexistence of both Heaven and Hell, or their emptiness. 3
    'We shall have to await the end of the Conclave,' the Cardinal thought. He was interrupted by a monk in attendance who knocked on his door and announced the arrival of a courier from Paris.
    `Who does he come from?' asked the Cardinal.
    Dueze had a smothered, strangled, utterly toneless voice, though it was perfectly distinct.
    `From the Count de Bouville,' replied the monk. `He must have ridden fast, for he looks very tired; when I went to open to him, I found him half asleep, his forehead against the door.,
    'Bring him to me at once.'
    And the Cardinal, who had been meditating a few minutes before on the vanity of the ambitions of this world, immediately thought: `Can it be on the subject of the election? Is the Court of France openly supporting my candidature? Is someone going to offer me a bargain?'
    He felt excited, full of hope and curiosity; he walked up and down the room with little, rapid steps. Dueze was no taller than a boy of fifteen, and had a mouse-like face beneath thick white eyebrows and fragile bones.
    Beyond the windows the sky was beginning to turn pink; it was already dawn but not yet light enough to snuff the c andles. His bad hour was over.
    The courier entered; at first glance, the Cardinal knew that this was no usual courier. In the first place, a professional would immediately have gone down on his knee and handed over his message-box, instead of remaining on his feet, bowing and saying, `Monseigneur . . .' Besides, the Court of France sent its messages by strong, solidly built horsemen, well inured to hardship, such as big Robin-Cuisse-Maria, who often made the journey between Paris and Avignon, and not a stripling with a pointed nose, who seemed hardly able to keep his eyes open and reeled in his boots from fatigue.
    'It looks very like a disguise,' Dueze thought. `And what's more, I've seen that face somewhere before.'
    He broke the seals of the letter with his thin short hands and was at once disappointed. It did not concern the election. It was merely a plea for protection for the messenger. Nevertheless, he saw a favourable sign in this; when Paris desire d some service from the ecclesiastical authorities, they now looked to him.
    'Allora, lei e it Signore Guccio Baglioni?'* he said, when he had finished reading.
    The young man started to hear himself addressed in